Shadow Warrior (30 page)

Colby found the atmosphere in Washington very different from when he had last worked there in 1951. The CIA was in turmoil on several levels. Throughout the 1950s, Americans had viewed their spooks and spies as unadulterated heroes. Even, and sometimes especially, to those on the political left, the Agency was exemplary. Had not Joe McCarthy himself targeted the CIA for a purge? “After all,” Colby wrote, “we were the derring-do boys who parachuted behind enemy lines, the cream of the academic and social aristocracy, devoted to the nation's service, the point men and women in the fight against totalitarian aggression, matching fire with fire in an endless round of thrilling adventures like those of the scenarios of James Bond films.” In those halcyon days there had been no journalistic exposés or congressional investigations. The press accorded the Agency a privileged position, heeding its call to refrain from reporting on its activities in the name of national security and even allowing operatives to use jobs in the print and broadcast media as cover. Congressional oversight was superficial, at best. The CIA director consulted periodically and vaguely with the chairmen of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees as well as with a subcommittee of the latter that supervised the process by which the CIA's budget was hidden among those of other agencies. The senators and congressmen, typified by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, were patriotic, anticommunist, and discreet. All agreed that in the intelligence business, the need for secrecy trumped both the press and the public's need to know. Russell told the director that though he was entitled to detailed information about the Agency's activities, he didn't want it “except in the rarest of cases.”
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But the Bay of Pigs had tarnished the CIA's image and opened a Pandora's Box. Virtually every literate American became aware of the CIA, and not in a positive way. The botched invasion of Cuba made the Agency appear callous, incapable of secrecy, and, worst of all, inept. Contempt and respect are mutually exclusive. America's James Bond had become a
character out of Laurel and Hardy. Media coverage of the nation's intelligence community intensified. News stories appeared on the CIA's failed attempt to oust Sukarno in Indonesia, its use of ex-Nazis to build the West German intelligence service, the Gary Powers U-2 fiasco, and other failures.

No one was angrier at the CIA and its humiliation of the president over the botched Bay of Pigs operation than Robert Kennedy, JFK's alter ego and guardian angel (or devil, as some would say). The attorney general, with the White House's approval, had decided to seize control of the intelligence community and do what it had not been able to do—get rid of Castro. JFK had wanted to appoint his brother DCI, but Bobby felt the White House needed to distance itself from covert operations. After six months, the Kennedys had settled on McCone, a deeply conservative Catholic from California who had made a fortune in the shipbuilding business. He had served in both the Truman and Eisenhower Defense Departments and as head of the Atomic Energy Commission. Robert Kennedy and McCone immediately bonded; the attorney general's Hickory Hill home was adjacent to the brand-new CIA headquarters compound at Langley, Virginia, and he would often stop by to visit with McCone on his way to the Justice Department in downtown Washington.

The 303 Committee continued its supervisory role over covert operations, but the Kennedy brothers created a supercommittee, the Special Group (augmented), to oversee the plan, code-named Mongoose, to kill Castro and overthrow Cuba's communist government. Just before Mc-Cone's swearing in, the Kennedy brothers summoned him to the White House and introduced him to Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, who would be chief of operations for “Project Cuba” (subsequently renamed Operation Mongoose). McCone promised to make Richard Helms, the newly appointed deputy director of plans, and all of his assets available for the war against Castro. Over the next few months, Lansdale devised more than thirty anti-Castro schemes; psychological warfare, sabotage, the raising of a guerrilla force within Cuba, disruption of the Cuban economy, and assassination of Castro himself and his chief lieutenants were all on the drawing board. The more outrageous assassination plots involved the use of exploding cigars, a lethal hypodermic needle disguised as a pen, a bacteria-infected wetsuit, and exploding seashells. To implement Mongoose, Helms selected William King Harvey, a pop-eyed, pot-bellied
veteran of the Berlin spy wars of the 1950s. Over the winter of 1961–1962, Harvey, the only CIA officer to openly carry a gun, assembled a team that included some 600 CIA operatives with some 4,000 to 5,000 contract personnel at their disposal. There were those in the Agency who decried Mongoose. Samuel Halpern, deputy chief of the Cuban desk, informed Helms that the Agency had only a few agents on the island, and they were rarely heard from. There was no evidence at all of a meaningful guerrilla movement. “Some people believed Ed [Lansdale] was a kind of magician,” Halpern later observed. “But I'll tell you what he was. He was basically a con man.”
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The Cuban Missile Crisis, culminating in October 1962, derailed any invasion plans, but after the dust settled, Bobby Kennedy ordered the men and women of Mongoose to redouble their efforts to wreak havoc on the island. Why, he kept asking, was it not possible for commandos to blow up Cuba's power plants, sugar mills, and factories?
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In early 1963, the Kennedy brothers, disgusted with the lack of results in the Cuban operation, fired Harvey, sidelined Lansdale, and brought Des FitzGerald on board to head the team. Bill Colby would replace FitzGerald as head of the Far East Division.

Perhaps the most important change Colby found upon his return to Washington from Saigon was an altered culture at CIA headquarters. During one of his first interviews with President Kennedy, McCone had observed that the CIA could not continue to be seen “as a ‘cloak and dagger' outfit . . . designed to overthrow governments, assassinate heads of state, [and] involve itself in political affairs of foreign states.” The primary task of the Agency should be to gather intelligence from its agents and from all intelligence agencies within the government, analyze it, and present its findings to the president. McCone would establish a Division of Science and Technology within the CIA to build on the successes of the U-2 and the Discover Spy Satellites. He did not say it, but McCone believed that the DCI should be one of the chief executive's principal advisers on foreign policy. Significantly, McCone chose Dick Helms, who came from the Foreign Intelligence (espionage) branch of the Agency, to head the Directorate of Plans. During their first year in office, McCone and Helms fired more than a hundred clandestine operatives. “It was clear that the FI culture was in the ascendancy and CA [covert action] no longer had the glamorous advantage it once had,” Colby wrote. Rumor had it that there would be no more large-scale paramilitary operations. Funding was cut for Colby's
political action initiative in Italy and for Frank Wisner's innumerable front operations.
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The irony was that nobody was more committed to covert action as a means to combat communism and realize the foreign policy objectives of the United States than the Kennedy brothers. Because of its unique position, only the CIA could operate behind the scenes to plan and fund covert paramilitary and political action operations, avoiding, as Colby put it, “diplomatic and political complications.”
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In the eyes of the Kennedy brothers, the CIA had been able to redeem itself in part through its actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis. U-2 overflights and reports from agents on the ground in Cuba had provided absolutely vital information on the presence and placement of Soviet missiles. In 1963, the White House would okay the continuation of covert operations in Laos and dozens of other hotspots around the world, but this turn of events was not in time to halt Operation Switchback in Vietnam.

The assumption between May 1962 and November 1963 of all paramilitary operations in Vietnam by the Department of Defense dealt a major blow to the counterinsurgency/pacification operations begun by Ed Lansdale and revived by Bill Colby and his colleagues. Colby's successor as Saigon station chief, John “Jocko” Richardson, quickly came to see the struggle between the South Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front purely in military terms. Events in the field seemed to confirm the wisdom of that view. On December 6, 1962, the Politburo of the North Vietnamese Communist Party (Lao Dong) voted to “dispatch combat forces to South Vietnam to build our mobile main force army and our combat arms and combat support units.”
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In January 1963, only 40 miles from Saigon, a small contingent of Viet Cong mauled a division-sized ARVN force near the village of Ap Bac. Sixty-one South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, a hundred were wounded, and five helicopters were shot down; only three Viet Cong bodies were found at the site at the end of the battle. Ap Bac would become grist for the mill of US journalists, many of whom were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the Diem regime; but neither John Richardson nor General Paul Harkins, the head of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV, the successor to MAAG), seemed to blame the government in Saigon. Harkins geared up for the war the US military had always wanted to fight, and Richardson continued to heap praise on the Ngo brothers, particularly Nhu. In the Highlands, Gil
Layton and Combined Studies reluctantly began to turn over control of the CIDG program to the South Vietnamese Army and US Special Forces. Surprisingly, given their training, Special Forces personnel seemed deaf and dumb to the need to build political consciousness and self-determination among the Rhade and other tribesmen.

By early 1963, Diem and MACV were increasingly obsessed with the Ho Chi Minh Trail and communist sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos. Those CIDG strike forces that Colonel Tung and his men did not disarm and disband were organized into regiment-sized units by the Special Forces and moved to the border to conduct intelligence and harassing operations against the Viet Cong and Pathet Lao (Laotian communists) across Vietnam's western borders. Meanwhile, in the Highlands, Tung replaced strike-force leaders with “haughty, cocky Vietnamese, who ‘intend[ed] to ride hard on the Rhade,'” according to one of the few remaining Combined Studies officers. The result was low morale and numerous desertions; the number of personnel enrolled in the CIDGs shrank from 38,500 in January 1963 to about 19,000 in January 1964. By early 1963, in fact, the Montagnards were on the verge of open revolt.
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Meanwhile, in Washington, Colby, as deputy and then head of the Far East Division, was trying to accommodate himself to Switchback. In February 1963, he advised the DCI that there was no alternative to the Agency relinquishing full control of paramilitary operations to the military. MACV and the ARVN might turn to Combined Studies when they needed advice and liaison on political matters, but there were no guarantees. Colby was not optimistic. He understood that in Vietnam, the military had from time immemorial been the enemy of the peasant: “Throughout history the army has been tax collector, oppressor and representative of ‘outside' authority and control,” he observed in a report to the National Security Council. Colby had experienced MAAG and MACV's tunnel vision during his tour as station chief; political action was, in their view, not only irrelevant but counterproductive. As often as not, the US military mission believed, political action threatened the regime in Saigon, and in wartime, political “stability” was a must. General Harkins paid lip service to the need to win the support of the countryside, but he would never admit to the need to subsume military measures to a political and social program, much less to the idea that large-scale military operations might be damaging to an effort to win hearts and
minds. In these views, Colby would later write, the military was complicit in the Ngo brothers' growing tendency toward authoritarianism and insularity.
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In meetings at US Pacific Command headquarters in Honolulu in May and November 1963—the latter held two days before JFK's assassination—McNamara outlined the Pentagon's increasingly grandiose plans for counterinsurgency and pacification in Vietnam. Special Forces would continue to train and arm irregular units in the Highlands, the delta, and the Central Lowlands, but they would be used in support of traditional military operations, in gathering intelligence, and in harassing the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. The secretary of defense unveiled Operational Plan 34A (OPLAN 34A), which would see the US military take over and expand the remnants of Project Tiger, the effort to insert spies and saboteurs into North Vietnam. Under the supervision of a new, top-secret unit—the Studies and Observation Group, or MACV-SOG—the Pentagon's unconventional warriors would, in Clausewitzian terms, attack North Vietnam's “centers of gravity.”
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The first target would be Hanoi's internal security. SOG would continue to smuggle agents into North Vietnam—this time primarily through maritime operations—to spy, harass, and sabotage. It would create a resistance movement in North Vietnam to do what the communists were doing in South Vietnam. McNamara expressed confidence that a massive covert effort could wreak havoc inside the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and cause Ho Chi Minh to stop supporting the insurgency in South Vietnam. The second target was the Ho Chi Minh Trail. SOG would coordinate the Special Forces border operations and attempt to launch strikes into Laos and Cambodia that would interdict North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong traffic.

Following his return to the States, Colby found himself in the thick of the Vietnam policymaking process, especially after he became head of the Far East Division in January 1963. He frequently accompanied McCone to National Security Council meetings and sometimes made the Agency's presentations himself. What he had seen of McNamara, he did not like. “In so many briefings,” he wrote, “I saw him furiously scribbling notes about the number of weapons, trainees, and equipment being supplied to Vietnam rather than standing aside and considering how to adjust our style of war to the one being conducted from the North.” During the discussions
of OPLAN 34A and SOG in Hawaii in November, Colby finally had enough. Taking his career in his hands, the former Jedburgh stood up and said, “Mr. Secretary, it won't work,” referring to the stepped-up plan to insert espionage and sabotage agents into North Vietnam. The DRV was a denied area. As had been the case in Eastern Europe and Communist China, the inserted personnel would be killed or turned and used against the United States and its allies. McNamara ignored him. Following the group's return to Washington from Honolulu, President Kennedy approved NSAM 273, which gave the go-ahead for OPLAN 34A. Operation Switchback would prove to be a disaster, Robert Myers, Colby's deputy, later recalled. McNamara, Myers said, succeeded in “increasing American and South Vietnamese failures by a factor of ten.”
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