Safe for democracy, p.63
Safe for Democracy, page 63
By the mid-sixties CIA officers were reporting intelligence on the movement of drugs. The agency passed the data on to drug enforcement authorities but not much else was done about it. Even this seemed too much for some. On one occasion Helms told Senator John Stennis, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, of this CIA reporting.
Stennis paused, shook his head, then said, “I’m not sure you people ought to be getting involved in things like that. I don’t know that that’s a proper activity for you.”
“Well, Mr. Chairman,” replied the CIA director, “how could we possibly not help the United States government when we’ve got such a hideous drug problem in this country?”
Helms insists the CIA helped, but its attitude was ambivalent at best. Tony Poe, for example, threatened to throw out of his plane anyone carrying drugs, but he did nothing about caravan traffic or drug laboratories in his sectors. Nor could the CIA do anything to prevent the Hmong’s own use of drugs, prevalent in their culture. A few attempts were made to encourage the Hmong to raise other cash crops instead of poppies, but the return on growing potatoes, meager by comparison, made the substitution absurd. There are unconfirmed but persistent reports that CIA officers were disciplined when they took such actions as destroying drug labs.
A prohibition against smuggling on Air America planes had been in place since 1957. But enforcement depended on the pilot, and the only remedy was to land at the nearest airfield and put offenders with drugs off the plane. When Air America crews themselves ran drugs, there was nothing to stop them. Not until early 1972 did the proprietary set up a Security Inspection Service, and even then it operated only at large installations.
Moreover there was competition. Some of those running drugs are said to have been among the most senior commanders of the RLAF. Drugs moved on Lao military and private air carriers. Air America crews faced a daily temptation of huge profits for smuggling small packages.
In the summer and fall of 1972, when Hugh Tovar led the CIA station in Vientiane, the agency’s inspector general, spurred by detailed revelations in a book the agency tried to suppress, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, began a formal investigation. Scott D. Breckinridge of the IG office participated in the team of officers who began in Hong Kong and spent more than two weeks at eleven agency facilities, interviewing more than a hundred CIA, State, USAID, Pentagon, Air America, and other employees. Their report, “Investigation of the Drug Situation in Southeast Asia,” found no evidence that the CIA or any of its senior officers had ever permitted drug traffic “as a matter of policy.” There had been individual cases of smuggling, but the persons involved were said to have been promptly disciplined. The Hmong, curiously, are presented as having had little to export.
While exonerating the agency (and claiming its critics discredited), Breckinridge’s account of these events confirms every charge aimed at CIA’s allies: Laotian generals did participate, drugs moved on military aircraft—and boats; laboratories were photographed; the agency even discovered schedules for planned shipments to South Vietnam. The episode is represented as a success, in isolation, as if the criminal activities of allies did not reflect on the agency. A few years later a CIA officer serving in Burma witnessed an IG inquiry on another matter and came away singularly unimpressed: “IGs, hoping for plum assignments, have a personal stake in not rocking the boat. I never again trusted an IG investigation until the inspector general position became presidentially appointed and congressionally approved.”
In any case, despite the denials, drugs moved. Ambassador Godley arranged for one senior Laotian officer to be fired. No more. Breckinridge reached the conclusion that the CIA could not have achieved much more against the drug traffic than it did. This points directly to a key weakness of covert operations: making alliances with indigenous groups inevitably involves buying into their less wholesome features. This in turn may help discredit CIA programs as well as the larger aims of American policy.
In turning against the Laotian secret war, Senator Symington and others in Washington were reacting to factors other than the military situation. Drugs were a major problem in the United States and had real military implications in South Vietnam, where American soldiers were becoming addicted in increasing numbers. Officials who believed the military situation in Laos could be divorced from all other matters were simply wrong.
In Vientiane and Washington the situation looked quite serious by 1970. With Hanoi and the Pathet Lao pressing against the Plain of Jars and the Hmong areas, Ambassador Godley asked for massive strikes by B-52 bombers. By now Washington was at loggerheads over “secrecy” in the Laotian war. Symington pressed for release of the full transcript of his hearing. The Nixon administration sanitized this so heavily as to make it misleading, whereupon Symington refused to issue the document. The request for air strikes came in this charged political context. Fearing leaks from the Pentagon about B-52s in Laos, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird opposed the option so as to create a record of rejecting it. Secretary of State William P. Rogers also resisted the plan. According to Henry Kissinger, national security adviser to Richard Nixon, Laird wanted the strikes put into a super-secret program whose records would be falsified. Such B-52 missions were already under way in Cambodia.
Growing congressional opposition and increasing enemy success sharpened Washington’s problem. “We were caught,” recounts Kissinger of the Washington policymakers, “between officials seeking to protect the American forces for which they felt a responsibility and a merciless Congressional onslaught that rattled those officials.”
Toward the middle of February the Royal Laotian Government appealed for B-52 strikes. Kissinger recommended the attack at a meeting with the president, Laird, Dick Helms, and the Joint Chiefs’ acting chairman. Richard Nixon approved strikes if the Pathet Lao advanced. Within twenty-four hours the condition had been met; an attack with three B-52 bombers took place on the night of February 17–18. More followed, yet Vang Pao relinquished his last positions on the Plain of Jars.
Strikes by the B-52s were enough, in Kissinger’s phrase, “to trigger the domestic outcry.” Senators Eugene McCarthy and Frank Church, along with Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield, deplored the escalation. By February 25 Symington, with Mansfield and Senators Charles Mathias, Albert Gore, John Sherman Cooper, and Charles Percy, were demanding full release of the Laos hearing transcripts.
Within hours the Laos war was secret no more. The story broke at Long Tieng and on press tickers the world over. Making the scoop proved as easy as walking down a mountain. Journalists had chartered an Air America plane to Sam Thong, the USAID center. The secret warriors were proud of their civic action programs and wanted to show the place off. But three reporters were much more interested in Long Tieng and the armée clandestine. They walked out of Sam Thong and down the trail to Long Tieng, leaving behind the official tour. One reporter actually entered the base and watched for two hours before being challenged by a Laotian colonel, then questioned by an American. All were taken into custody and put on a plane to Vientiane. Ambassador Godley was furious, but it was too late. For the first time Long Tieng had been observed by outsiders. Landings and takeoffs from the Lima Site were clocked at one a minute. Air traffic was so intense that planes and helicopters had to form a holding pattern. The reporters saw windowless buildings sprouting numerous radio aerials and tall men wearing civilian clothes but carrying automatic weapons. They knew the men were Americans when they discovered the base had an air-conditioned American-style officers club with panoramic glass windows. Beginning with the Los Angeles Times, the Long Tieng story appeared everywhere.
In the Senate, Symington asked the administration to bring Ambassador Godley back to testify. Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright went ahead and put on the record information the Nixon people had been trying to keep secret: that Helms had admitted in testimony that CIA used USAID cover in Laos. Fulbright added that the embassy’s Rural Development Annex recruited partisan soldiers and native agents while the mysterious Special Requirements Office did logistics. Further details were added in April 1970 when continuing pressure forced the administration to relent and release the 1969 congressional testimony.
Any chance of limiting the damage was lost when Nixon ordered an invasion of Cambodia. Further Laos hearings were scheduled by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Angry senators ruled out allowing testimony in executive session. This record would be in the open. These political events plus the military developments in Laos marked a tidal shift in the secret war.
In late 1971 Senator Symington sponsored an amendment to the appropriations bill that set a ceiling of $350 million for all U.S. funds spent in Laos. This level prevailed in 1972, though it increased to $375 million for the next year. Tovar’s field officers were having trouble keeping the North Vietnamese off Skyline Ridge. By that time Indochina peace negotiations were in full swing, leading to the Paris agreements of January 1973. For Laos these provided a coalition government, like that intended in 1958, except that the Pathet Lao had grown considerably stronger. Fourteen years of warfare accomplished none of the original U.S. goals. Vang Pao became a big loser in the settlement, which ended American air support for the secret army.
The cease-fire was to go into effect at noon on February 22, 1973, when Vang faced a renewed North Vietnamese offensive. Several outposts were under attack as the cease-fire neared. The Hmong general made a last appeal to the CIA. In reply he was handed a message from the chief of unit at Sky: “As we discussed previously, USAF support would cease as of 1200, 22 February. I confirmed this . . . today by talking with CRICKET, the [airbome command post] in this area. USAF were under instructions to clear Lao air space.”
Disgusted, Vang Pao kicked the dirt and showed the message to nearby reporters.
Leaving Laos, one of the last shifts of American command planes radioed back, “Good bye and see you next war.”
One of Long Tieng’s outposts fell two and a half hours later. The last CIA advisers left aboard Air America. Hugh Tovar soon left Laos also. Vang Pao, on his own, walked a road that could lead only to exile.
Beginning in 1973 the new Laotian government pressured Air America to cease operations. The CIA proprietary did halt flights to hundreds of airfields and gave a dozen C-123 transports to the Laotian air force. Many Air America employees at Udon were laid off. After a Laotian prohibition on its operations, Air America closed up shop in June 1974. The Udon facilities were taken over by Thai Airways Aircraft Maintenance Company.
The results of CIA’s postmortems on Laos are not known. One view is that of Douglas Blaufarb, Laos station chief in the mid-sixties. Blaufarb, who defended the Hmong against press criticism in the New York Times in 1971, continued to believe that the tribe had a right to fight for its future, their struggle misunderstood in the United States, in part precisely because of secrecy. In mobilizing the Hmong, the United States incurred an “undoubted moral obligation” which it could not meet. Blaufarb also believes the war effort was hampered by the predominance of the American military in Southeast Asia, which constantly menaced the independence of the ambassador in Vientiane. Finally, argues this former CIA officer, the improvised nature of the secret war led to an open-ended campaign without clear aims other than general U.S. objectives in Indochina.
Of course general U.S. objectives in Southeast Asia revolved around South Vietnam. The CIA labored long and hard there—on building a political base for the Saigon government, on pacification, on unconventional warfare programs. The guerrillas made the war real at the end of March 1965 when they detonated a car bomb just outside the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Station chief Peer de Silva, badly wounded, lost an eye. Agency secretary Barbara Robbins died while several more persons from the typing pool and at least two case officers, like de Silva, were wounded. Eleazar Williams stepped into the breach to act as station chief until Langley promoted Gordon Jorgensen. During that interval President Johnson decided to commit U.S. troops to combat in South Vietnam, and the war intensified.
Under LBJ’s dictum that the first team should go to Vietnam, and given the dominance of Cuban operations in the early 1960s, CIA’s next station chief was John L. Hart, from the Cuba task force. Hart came to Saigon early in 1966, a forty-five-year-old man with broad experience. He had had a hand in Wisner’s Wurlitzer, doing political action in Italy, but also paramilitary work in the Korean War and the Tibetan operation, where he had been in charge when the Dalai Lama escaped the country. Hart had headed CIA stations in Thailand in the early 1950s, and in Morocco later. Far East Division chief Bill Colby had several things in common with Hart: both had been born in the United States and raised abroad, in Hart’s case Albania and Iraq as the son of a diplomat; both served in Italy; and Hart had been born in Minneapolis, across the river from Colby in its twin city, St. Paul. By all accounts the agency’s Asia baron had no problem with the new Saigon station chief.
Some recall that John Hart had little stomach for paramilitary operations. But he had participated in several, and it would be on his watch that the CIA went into high gear on fresh projects, opening a training center at Vung Tau for counterterror team recruits. By the spring of 1966 there were more than three thousand armed men in several programs. Hart also emphasized political action, providing funds and specialists to South Vietnamese labor unions and certain parties, and expertise to Vietnamese writing a new constitution. In 1966–1967 South Vietnam held national assembly and then presidential elections with CIA backing it all the way. The elections were less about democracy than about solidifying the power of the Vietnamese generals.
For much of this period Ed Lansdale resided in Saigon in one last incarnation, this time as a sort of factotum for the ambassador but actually as a conduit for his South Vietnamese contacts. Lansdale functioned as intelligence collector par excellence. He left soon after the enemy’s 1968 Tet offensive. Bill Colby and John Hart shared Lansdale’s perception that the road to success lay in winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. Colby peddled that line incessantly in Washington, in policy papers and in his advice to superiors, with Hart a kindred spirit. But the headaches involved were legion. The United States did not even know how many South Vietnamese there were, even just in Saigon, much less how to gain their allegiance. As Hart later recorded, “We had only the vaguest notion of how many people lived in that benighted country and there was certainly no way of taking a census in the midst of war.” Hart tried his best. In fact, one of his pacification initiatives in 1966 was to create “census grievance” teams—trained at Vung Tau—dispersed into the villages to find out not only how many people there were but what they were saying about Saigon and who had sided with the National Liberation Front.
Hart approved the appointment of a set of regional CIA chiefs for South Vietnam’s military command zones, who could connect with the Saigon Police Special Branch in their areas and take care of other agency activities. The regional officers were followed by CIA people appointed for each South Vietnamese province.
Nelson Brickham, Hart’s chief of operations, came to him with an even more ambitious proposal, one to keep book on the bad guys—essentially to create a database on just who belonged to the NLF and where they stood in its parallel hierarchy. After the consideration at Langley—not only by Colby but by Helms and the agency’s new special assistant for Vietnam affairs, Phillip Carver—this would be called Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation (ICEX), a direct predecessor to the Phoenix Program. Hart, temporarily sidelined by eye problems (a detached retina suffered while playing tennis), did not participate in the late 1967 meetings that actually created Phoenix, which aimed to combine the understanding of the NLF supposedly developed by ICEX with efforts aimed at neutralization. Under Phoenix there were to be interrogation centers in each province, and later district, to collect even more data. A new paramilitary force, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units, became the CIA’s enforcement mechanism, but South Vietnamese police and military units were also involved.
Phoenix was up and running in the spring of 1968, but by then Hart had left, replaced by his deputy, Lou Lapham. It formed part of a fresh organization, Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS), that united all pacification programs. By then William E. Colby had returned to Saigon, sent by LBJ to be deputy chief of CORDS. Colby succeeded to the top job when his boss, Robert Komer—also an old CIA hand—became U.S. ambassador to Turkey. As a result it would be Colby who presided over CORDS and Phoenix. Although much would be accomplished on pacification, the Phoenix Program became highly controversial due to human rights violations, the problem of huge numbers of South Vietnamese political prisoners, and its inability to develop the information necessary to attack the higher levels of the NLF infrastructure.
Most frequently Phoenix functioned as a vehicle for Saigon officials to engage in extortion, eliminate their rivals, or solidify power. While tens of thousands of alleged NLF cadres were “neutralized” under Phoenix, the number of senior Liberation Front officials swept up were a mere handful. Colby worked hard to inject discipline and legal processes into the effort, but he was never able to control it. In the meantime Phoenix became a political football in the United States, leading to a series of congressional hearings, much like those on Laos, in which Colby was beset by critics. He returned to the United States in 1971, his future at every turn dogged by participation in this program.
Phoenix piled up some impressive statistics. During 1969 alone, it “neutralized” just under twenty thousand NLF suspects, of whom more than six thousand died. In 1971 Colby told a Senate hearing that there had been more than twenty thousand killed in all, almost thirty thousand people imprisoned, and about eighteen thousand converted into Saigon agents. Not to be outdone, the South Vietnamese claimed more than forty thousand dead suspects. But when questions arose over the legality of these operations, even under Vietnamese law, authorities rapidly retreated to an admission that 87 percent of the supposed cadres had perished in the course of regular military operations.
