Deadly Deceits (16 page)

I decided that in the future I had to be certain before ever again sounding an alarm. I began to appreciate the weaknesses in the evaluation system. Reflecting back to my duties on the Thai desk at Headquarters, in my ignorance I had evaluated reports on the strength of the Thai Communist Party that probably had been as flawed as my own assessment of the situation in the South, and I had found them to be reasonable and accurate. But had they been?

On one occasion the Thai police and military arrested and interrogated more than 200 people in Pattalung Province in mid-South Thailand for presumed involvement with the Communist Party. When a stack of 200 interrogations reached Bangkok, another station officer and I were assigned to try to make some sense of them. The reports reflected the work of untrained interrogators, and any pearls of information were lost in the mountain of verbiage.

For several weeks we worked long, hard hours to isolate
those pearls and to put together one complete picture. As we read and reread the massive reports, we could remember that somewhere in another report we had read a confirming item, but without rereading all of the reports we could not locate the item. We did not card the information, nor did we set up geographic and subject files. We were trying in essence to work with that mass of data without processing it. We were winging it, and the results were terrible—the inchoate mess remained just that. But again I learned a lesson that later I had the opportunity to apply on a massive scale: you could not analyze large amounts of information without careful and adequate preparation.

About this time I came across an example of the use of intelligence to promote the ambitions of one individual. One of the station's most important penetration operations into the Thai Communist Party was run by a case officer I shall call Sam, who had been in Thailand for several years. Sam had the primary responsibility for collecting and recording information on the Thai Communist Party and followed a strict need-to-know policy for anyone seeking information from his files. No one was permitted access to his inner sanctum, a vaulted room within our secure area. Sam's sophisticated deception operation against the Thai Communist Party was done via his principal agent. A former official of the Thai Communist Party, the principal agent supposedly had created a splinter group dedicated to peaceful revolution. Through the splinter group the CIA hoped to divide the Communists and restrain then violence.

The Agency awarded Sam the Medal of Intelligence for his successful deception. However, after Sam left the station, his carefully guarded files were opened for general use, and the new case officer who had replaced Sam began working with the principal agent. The new case officer found that Sam had been more effective deceiving the station than the Communists. His operation was more fantasy than fact. The new case officer dropped the operation and the principal agent.

But the story does not end there. A few years passed, and the CIA again assigned Sam to Thailand. He proposed that the Agency rehire his old principal agent. At the time I worked in the international communism branch at Headquarters. The chief of the Thai desk asked me to evaluate Sam's proposal.
I did so with a vengeance. I recounted the history of the operation and said the agent had no access and probably was a fabricator. (The Thai Communist Party espoused armed revolution as dictated by Asian Communist methodology, and at that time only a fool would openly opt for peaceful revolution, as he would immediately find his motivation questioned.) I predicted disaster if we rehired the principal agent, but he was rehired and authored a series of fabricated intelligence reports. When our enthusiasm for him finally waned, the principal agent took another tack. He wrote a book about CIA activities in Thailand, claiming to reveal, among other things, an agent of the CIA.
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With this operational disaster one might expect the case officer finally to get his due. Sam, in competition with numerous other officers, was given an assignment to a prime overseas post. He later was named chief of personnel for the East Asia division, where he presumably looked for others with his own unique capabilities.

This, as I was to discover later, was not atypical of Agency personnel policies. But at the time I still felt cases like Sam's and Dave Abbott's were aberrations. To see them otherwise would have required me to rethink my own motivations and justifications. And I wasn't ready to do that. After all, I was happy. I believed in the Agency and our policies in Southeast Asia, which I regarded as somewhere between the Peace Corps and missionary work. I was proud of my family. My four children—two teenage daughters, one ten-year-old and one five-year-old son—after overcoming their initial reluctance to leave their Herndon friends, had adjusted happily to the traditional high school atmosphere at the American-run international school. My wife was enjoying her job as secretary for the Agency. I had no inkling that before this tour ended, everything for me would turn upside down—not because of professional failure, but because of unparalleled success.

Six months into my tour Dave assigned me temporarily to mid-South Thailand where I was to help establish an organization to collate information on the Thai Communist Party. I had been in a provincial capital in the mid-South for two months when one night I suddenly felt an excruciating pain
under my right rib cage. The pain was accompanied by diarrhea and weakness. I suspected that my problem was something I had eaten at a restaurant and that the pain would disappear as quickly as it had come. But as the hours passed, I got sicker and weaker.

The next day I was scheduled to go with the governor of the province to sign a construction contract. I had been working on this signing for two months, and I did not want to miss it. That morning I was just able to drag myself up and get dressed and go to the meeting. Afterwards my counterpart Thai officers checked me into the local hospital. They then notified my superiors in Bangkok that I was seriously ill.

The hospital, a small one-story wooden building, lacked most facilities. I was taken to a room that had a bed and a combination Thai toilet and water barrel shower. The bed had a hard, kapok-filled mattress and a musty, holey mosquito net that kept out the only breeze in that sweltering heat while letting in selected hordes of mosquitos. The doctor was pleasant and seemed to know his business, but spoke no English. My interpreter's abilities did not extend into the technical field of medicine, and all I got from him was that my body was under attack by tiny internal bugs. Further than this his English would not go. By this time it did not matter to me, as I was drifting in and out of consciousness and just wanted to be left alone.

After three or four days in a fog, I vaguely perceived that I was to be shipped to Bangkok on the U.S. military's C-54, which made a milk-run stop every Friday. Even in my dazed condition it seemed odd to me that the station, with its own fleet of planes, would allow me to languish in this out-of-the-way place. But my mind could not focus enough to take the necessary initiative to arrange transportation to Bangkok.

Norma was in a panic when she saw me, for my condition had grown quite serious. The American doctor for the official American community met the plane, but his main concern seemed to be the inconvenience of having an ambulance at the airport to pick me up, something the doctor in the South had insisted upon.

When the party arrived at the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital in Bangkok, I was assigned to a room that had neither a toilet nor an air conditioner, a virtual must in the oppressive
Bangkok heat. A Thai-style public toilet was located several doors away, and it was a constant and frequent challenge to use that facility. The diarrhea had not abated, and I had to wait in line with other patients and visitors. Once inside, I found it nearly impossible to squat Thai-style over the hole in the floor, but by careful placement I could brace my back, which kept me from collapsing.

My official doctor and the hospital doctors, all American Seventh Day Adventists, began to squabble over the cause of my condition. Our “Doc” was not sure what I had, while the staff doctors all diagnosed it as an amoebic attack on the liver—which sounded similar to what the doctor in the South had been saying. As the doctors bickered, my condition grew steadily worse. I was so weak that the nurses, when trying to take my temperature, had to prod me to keep me from lapsing off into unconsciousness. After a week of sparring between the doctors, Norma received an urgent message from Doc, who told her my condition was deteriorating and that he was going to perform exploratory surgery right away. Norma arrived at the hospital after the nurses had completed shaving the entire front of me and painting me with a red antiseptic. She looked ready to faint when she entered the room.

As the time scheduled for the operation came and went, we began to question the nurses, who gave noncommittal answers. Some days later a staff doctor told me what had happened. He said the entire staff of doctors had been convinced that I was suffering from an amoebic attack on my liver. Doc, a surgeon, did not agree. He had scheduled the surgery, which, according to the staff doctors, would have killed me. The staff doctors issued an ultimatum: if Doc persisted in his plans to operate, he had to take me to another hospital. Further, if I stayed there, the staff doctors would begin immediate treatment for my condition. Doc finally relented. A staff doctor stuck a long, tube-like needle into my swollen liver and slowly drew out a mass of pus and dead cells. The treatment to kill the amoeba worked, and I started on the several-month-long road to recovery. To this day I suffer from a damaged liver and curse Doc for his incompetence and stubbornness.

While recovering at home, I began to dwell on the way the Agency had bungled my situation. The station's management had allowed me to deteriorate in a small isolated town
while its Air America planes flew VIPs around at whim. The doctor for the official American community had totally misdiagnosed my illness. If it hadn't been for the staff doctors at the hospital, I surely would have died. I wondered how much real concern the Agency had for a lifelong employee. As my condition improved, though, my faith in the CIA correspondingly revived. I convinced myself that I had been the victim of special circumstances beyond Agency control and blamed myself in part for not taking a more active role in getting to Bangkok.

Several months after my recovery, I was called to the office of the CIA station executive officer. He and a new deputy chief of station—Dave Abbott had finally left—had assumed the duties of running the day-to-day activities of the station, leaving Rod Johnson, the chief, full time to court the Thais.

The executive officer greeted me with a big smile and a hello and asked me to sit down. After asking about my health, he said, “Ralph, I have been watching your programs lately, and I am most impressed. Rod and I have chosen you to assume a major new responsibility. As you know, AID [the Agency for International Development] has traditionally worked with the 50,000-man national police, but they are incapable of establishing an intelligence-collection program for them. We want you to initiate an intelligence program for the police.”

I was dumbfounded. Was this a big put-down, or was it a major new responsibility? I was well aware of the traditional hostility between the CIA and AID, particularly when one tried to horn in on the other's territory. “How does AID feel about this?” I asked.

“The ambassador has given us specific authority to take on this assignment,” he said, “and Rey Hill [the local AID chief] concurs. We also reached an agreement with the commander of the police.”

A gnawing doubt remained, for in some CIA programs of this type there was a tendency to provide money, jeeps, weapons, equipment, and training to the foreign liaison service. It
would take a large staff of American officers to handle such a requirement. “What about support for the police?” I asked.

Approaching the crux of the matter, the executive officer explained, “Oh, you won't have to worry about that. We don't want to get into another logistical operation. We intend for you to piggyback on AID's largesse. If you need any special help, we can come up with a few bucks.”

Here was my “Mission Impossible”: convert a bunch of unschooled patrolmen into sophisticated intelligence gatherers and do it without money or the authority that comes with it. I could not have asked for a more difficult or challenging assignment.

The first step on Mission Impossible was to locate Colonel Chat Chai (not his real name), the head of the police intelligence office. I called his office and was told that he was on a trip to Pattalung Province, investigating the latest communist incident. The executive officer, who was pushing me to get started, provided a station plane to take me to Pattalung.

The plane landed at the small grass airstrip just outside the town of Pattalung. I piled into a
samlor
—a three-wheel vehicle resembling a bike in front with a two-seat chair behind—and we took off. My bulk and the low hills were just about all the driver could cope with, but we soon entered Pattalung, which was as neat as a pin and unusually quiet. It reminded me of a small, sleepy southern U.S. town. The lawns were trimmed and bordered with large whitewashed stones. Except for a jeep or two there were no vehicles other than
samlors
. I wondered how a communist insurgency could take root in such a serene setting.

We pulled up at the open-fronted police station, and I went in to ask the desk sergeant about Colonel Chat Chai. He said the colonel had left that morning for Had Yai, a city further south. The sergeant gave me directions for taking a bus to Had Yai and pointed out the location of the bus station, a wide spot in the road.

After a long wait the bus appeared, or rather chugged, snorted, rocked, and rolled into sight. And what a sight! Its roof was loaded with pigs and chickens in bamboo cages, bundles of the locally famous rambutan fruit, large sacks of rice, and an assortment of bags and ratty suitcases that mushroomed out over the top of the bus, which seemed to defy the
law of gravity by not tipping over under the weight of that top-heavy load. With some trepidation I boarded and squeezed my way back onto one of the hard wooden benches at the rear. My six-foot-plus frame could not fit in the space between the benches, so I found an aisle seat where my legs could hang out. Farmers, both men and women, jammed the bus. The women, some of them chewing the unattractive red betel nut, wore traditional farm garb—waist-high, wrap-around sarongs and long-sleeved blouses. Most had removed the conical straw hats that in the fields protected them from the hot sun. The men wore clothing that was stained from their labors. The all-purpose
pakama
, a large rectangular cotton piece of material, usually with a large checkered design, was in general use. It was folded diaper fashion to serve as shorts; it was wound around the head as a turban, and it was used to carry lunches.