Deadly Deceits (18 page)

The village's small, wooden-framed, thatch-roofed houses were open to allow maximum air flow in the stifling heat. They sat on stilts, and water buffaloes, pigs, and chickens took refuge in the shade underneath.

On the first day Lieutenant Somboon, Colonel Chat Chai, and I visited the village headman at his home to explain our purpose and to get his cooperation. The headman, dressed in loose-fitting, pajama-like trousers and a Western shirt, was impressed by the high-ranking visitors. He was extremely polite, although he had some trouble comprehending what was happening and particularly why an American was involved. While we sat on a straw mat on the wooden floor discussing our work, a servant brought us weak tea. The headman agreed to call a meeting of the townspeople that night at the
sala glang
, the central meeting area.

When the villagers had gathered that night, Lieutenant Somboon announced, “We have come here to help you people
free yourselves from the nuisance of the jungle soldiers [the name given to the Communists]. The jungle soldiers come into your village, take your rice and money, and preach about the evils of our government. They say that the government oppresses you with taxes, but they don't explain what your government does with that money. Last year in this village the government collected only a few thousand
baht
, and yet this sum is less than the annual salary of the teacher the government provides to educate your children, but what do the jungle soldiers do for you?”

Lieutenant Somboon's speech was designed to counter the specific propaganda themes that the Communists used in this village, as determined during our research. “I and my group of government officials have come here to learn the problems of you villagers,” explained Lieutenant Somboon, “especially problems caused by the jungle soldiers. To help us in this task, we want to talk to each person to learn what is happening and how best we can help you. We will talk privately to each of you so that the jungle soldiers cannot know what is being said. Everything you tell us we will keep in strictest confidence. Tomorrow we will begin visiting each home. Thank you for your cooperation and for coming here this evening.”

The next day the team fanned out through the village with each member questioning one person. They would set up just about anywhere—on tree stumps, in a clearing, sitting on high mounds near the houses, but always ensuring that the interviews were conducted out of hearing range of other people.

If the person being questioned was an ordinary villager, the team member would ask if the subject had heard of Communist front groups such as the Farmers' Liberation Association (FLA), jungle soldiers, or others. The person was asked about any unusual events that had occurred in the village. The interviewer wrote down any significant information in a notebook he carried with him and later prepared a written report.

When questioning a suspected or known Communist, the session was more of a confrontation. We had learned during the trial project that the Communists organized three-man cells of what they called the Farmers' Liberation Association. Once the team got the first confession from a member of the
FLA, this was the break it needed. A confessed member of the three-man FLA cell had to name the other members of the cell, the person who had recruited him, and down the line. With this information the team members would interrogate the other named cell members. The interrogators would be able to tell the other cell members the most specific details about their Communist associations—their Communist aliases, the man who had recruited them, the names of the other two people in their cell. The subject was advised that he must cooperate to qualify for government mercy. If he did, he would be forgiven.

With a confession from a member of the FLA, the interviewer would prepare a report of all names, aliases, and other information and pass the report on to Lieutenant Somboon. He in turn would read the reports to look for leads and contradictions and then pass them on to the translators, who put them into English for me. I also looked for leads and contradictions that could help break down the resistance of some of the subjects. For instance, one person claimed that he and his friend Chalong had gone fishing one night, but Chalong had said that he had stayed home. The team members used this disparity and finally wrung confessions from the two friends. In fact, both had gone together to a Communist indoctrination session at a nearby guerrilla camp.

The team approached various confessed members of the FLA to serve as agents for the government. Our purpose in doing this was twofold. First, we needed agents in the organization, and second, we anticipated that some of them would inform their Communist superiors about the recruitment. We did not try to recruit others because we hoped that when they talked with their Communist superiors about their interviews and did not mention a recruitment attempt, they would come under suspicion. By this tactic we hoped to sow dissension in the heretofore solid ranks of the Communists.

In this first village one of the leading Communists refused to admit his role. Never one to be thwarted, Lieutenant Somboon told the man if he did not confess by a certain time his father would be shot. Two-way radio walkie-talkies were set up between Somboon and the “executioners.” When the time passed with no confession, Somboon ordered the “execution” to be carried out. Over the radio the suspect could hear the
orders to shoot, the shots, and a loud moaning. A man shouted over the radio that the father was only wounded, but quick medical attention could save his life. Somboon said, “No, let him die.” Finally the suspect relented and admitted that he was a leading member of the village's Farmers' Liberation Association. Somboon yelled over the radio to rush the injured man to the doctor. After the suspect made a full confession, Somboon explained the ruse was necessary for the man's own good.

Shortly thereafter, the wife of a leading Communist refused to admit her husband's membership in the FLA. She said her husband was out of town looking for work. Somboon accused her of lying and said he was going to have her child killed if she did not cooperate. Somboon later told me that he believed she herself was a hard-line Communist because she never budged or showed a flicker of emotion.

In that same village a young man in his late teens, after being confronted with evidence of his membership in the FLA, finally confessed. He broke down and cried that he was terribly ashamed, that he was a good Buddhist, but the Communists had tricked him. He did not know what his parents would think. He apparently could not live with the guilt. That night he hanged himself.

I was not particularly disturbed by those violations of human rights, as I felt we were fighting the hated communists and that the ends justified the means.

During the questioning phase of the operation the two Thai police colonels, the four translators, and I moved into the local police commander's rural Thai house. The two colonels and the male translator bunked in a large dormitory-like room. The three female translators had the main bedroom, while I slept in an enclosed lean-to adjacent to the open eating area. My “room” was just big enough for a cot and my suitcase. There were no fans, but gaps between the wooden slats let in any slight breeze. Our bathing facilities consisted of a tin-enclosed area containing a large, water-filled, earthen urn. To shower, you had to dip into the urn with a small pan and pour that water over yourself.

The management team—the two colonels, the translators, and I—set up an office in a large, wooden, barn-like structure that served as the village's central meeting place. We
worked there on wooden folding chairs and benches seven days a week for three months. The constant eating, working, and living together created predictable tensions. Two of the males paired off with two of the females, creating another set of problems. To add to these strains, Colonel Chat Chai occasionally brought his typewriter back to the house, where he would type until dawn, each strike of a key sending shock waves up my spine.

To escape the pressure, including the constant strain of trying to cope with the idiomatic Thai being spoken, each evening I would take a long walk. These strolls down the dusty paths helped me to relax and gave me a chance to appreciate the beauty of rural Thailand. Occasionally my route took me by the small river where the Thais bathed and did their laundry, evoking in me yearnings for a more peaceful way of life.

The work in the village had an unexpected result, exploding the insurgency as a needle explodes a balloon. For once the secrecy and security behind which the Communists had organized were destroyed, the movement in that village died, at least for the time being. In that village the leader of one of the 40-man cell structures of the Farmers' Liberation Association was confronted with knowledge of his guilt. Subjected to three days of questioning and discussions of the government's “good work,” he became convinced that the Communists had duped him. He then helped the team get confessions from his subordinates in the FLA and joined the government's Volunteer Defense Corps.

The U.S. government at the time was sponsoring in Northeast Thailand two programs it had adopted from similar efforts in Vietnam—Census Aspiration Cadre and People's Action Teams. The census cadres were trained in census taking and supposedly could determine the political leanings of villagers by saying they were there to listen to problems and grievances against the government. Census cadres sent frequent reports to their headquarters naming villagers as either pro-government or pro-communist. This American-supported program in both Vietnam and Thailand proved to be at best worthless and at worst a way for Communists to get on an American payroll and feed us a mass of contrived information. For example, Lieutenant Somboon discovered that the census cadre in the first village we surveyed was a long-standing
member of the Communist Party of Thailand and the leader of an extensive FLA structure. The man was arrested and jailed.

People's Action Teams were small groups of locally recruited villagers who were trained and armed to assist the village and protect it from the Communists. At this early stage the teams did seem to restrict the movement of the Communists. For instance, in this village and several others later on, the farmers who confessed to being members of the FLA refused to remain in their homes because they claimed the Communists would kill anyone who had cooperated with our survey team. Although the interviews had been conducted out of hearing range, other villagers had observed the farmers demonstrating the weapons firing positions taught by the Communists. As a result, Lieutenant Somboon was informed that 70 people had left the village when our survey team departed. I arranged to have a People's Action Team unit stationed in the village, and the people returned. Later we received reports that all active cooperation with the Communists in that village had ceased.

Our survey team had come to this district just after a unit from the CPM-1 base had conducted a month-long military sweep, looking for armed bands of insurgents. The military patrols had raced through the rice paddies in half-track personnel carriers and tanks, tearing up the fields, and angry, untrained military interrogators with no knowledge of the area had beaten the local farmers. The little information they got had not been collated or analyzed. It had been a typical beat-'em-down-with-hardware type of operation which had succeeded in nothing but earning the enmity of the villagers and swelling the number of volunteers into the Communist ranks. In comparison, our survey team obtained confessions from more than 500 village-based FLA members. We also learned the location of various guerrilla campsites, and one time—although this was not part of our mission—the team tried to oust the guerrillas from their camp. The team was not well-armed, and guerrillas out-fought them, killing one member of the team.

Upon completion of the three-month survey operation in 10 villages, I had all the interview statements translated and copies filed by village and subject paragraphs. All cell members and guerrillas were entered on 3x5 index cards that gave a
brief synopsis of the information and the date and file location of the complete interview form. In one case we had more than 20 multiple-entry cards on a political organizing cadre. Security forces using this information, including his group's recognition signals, ambushed the group and killed the cadre.

Using all the index cards and files, I wrote a final report. I prepared name lists of cell members, including their aliases, by village. In this district the list contained the names of more than 500 persons. Those 500 cell members did not appear anywhere in Agency reporting at that time. The CIA estimated there were 2,500 to 4,000 Communists in all of Thailand. But our surveys showed the Communists probably had that many adherents in Sakorn Nakorn Province alone.

We disseminated the final report to American and Thai intelligence organizations. Praise came back immediately. The Agency's Directorate for Intelligence gave the report the highest rating in all six of its grading categories. The State Department rated it the same. The Far East division noted its unique contribution. The Bangkok counterinsurgency command rated police collection efforts tops in intelligence for that month and for every month in which a survey report was produced. Thai Deputy Prime Minister Praphat Charusathien issued a unit award to the team. General Saiyut Kerdpol, the day-today commander of the Communist Suppression Operations Command, issued official praise and traveled to the province to learn about the surveys.

Bo Daeng, the governor of the province, was ecstatic. Even though he was a native of the province and had lived there all his life, he said he had no idea what the communists were doing until he read our reports. The American consul in Udorn, Al Francis (who later served as Ambassador Graham Martin's top aide in Vietnam), began spending days at my office avidly reading the reports. Lastly, my own assessment. I had worked in intelligence for 15 years. In all that time I had dealt in vague, partial, shifting, incomplete, fragmentary intelligence that was part of an unknown total picture. The survey reports, I felt, changed all that. They were complete, accurate, detailed, and of excellent quality.