Deadly Deceits (20 page)

I agonized day and night while enduring a series of very sad farewell parties thrown by the governor, the commander of the CPM-1, other Americans, and the Thai office staff. The office staff and I had developed an extremely good working relationship and they all believed in the work. Their tears at my departure burned me to the quick. Try as I might, I just could not understand what had happened. It was only years later that the truth slowly began to dawn on me: while the survey revelations demonstrated the strategy and composition of an Asian rural revolution and produced a method to contain it in Thailand, the opposite was true in Vietnam—the surveys would have shown there that the communists could not be defeated.

9. HEADQUARTERS:

GHOSTS IN THE HALLS

WHEN I arrived back at Headquarters from Thailand in late 1967 to begin processing for my new assignment as branch chief on Taiwan, I found out that the assignment had been cancelled.
[One 22-word sentence deleted.]
I realized that I had been set up by Rod Johnson and Dave Abbott. The dispatch offering me the job of branch chief on Taiwan was a ruse to get me out of Thailand. When it didn't work, Johnson had just told me to go. This deception was an added shock to my already confused state of mind, and I set out to “walk the halls” to look for another assignment. I was apathetic, and in light of all that had happened I was having a difficult time justifying my previously idealistic view of the Agency.

One day the head of China activities offered me a desk job of no real import. I didn't give a damn about the job. My prior tours with China activities indicated that everything there was more shadow than substance. But I was too demoralized to refuse.

The essential personality characteristic necessary to survive the daily minutiae of China activities was patience. Things happened at a snail's pace. You had to slowly digest, regurgitate, and re-digest unimportant information, while pretending to be enthralled by the process. You had to defend vehemently your position on trivia. You had to play the game.

With another case officer I shared an office that had a view of the American flag waving outside. I spent a lot of my time with my feet propped up on the desk looking out the window, ruminating about the Agency, the country, the flag, and what it all meant. I had plenty of time to kill, and so did a lot of others in the same boat. Frequent office bull sessions
reminded me of my sophomore days at Notre Dame. Sometimes a few of us would continue the discussions on a coffee break in the cafeteria. This was good for killing about an hour. Lunch entailed a trip to the cafeteria or to nearby McLean, culminating with a long stroll around the Headquarters building that used up at least another hour and a half.

The corridors in China activities gave you the feeling that time had stopped. Ghosts of case officers past roamed the halls, carrying pieces of paper that gave purpose to their eerie missions. The noon hour found the corridors totally empty except for a lone secretary or a true believer.

But every day did bring a few cables and dispatches from China units scattered around the world. Most such documents noted the efforts of the case officers to spot and assess people with access to Chinese officials serving overseas.
¹
China activities had begun to realize the near impossibility of recruiting a Chinese official to be our spy. To keep busy and to show progress, the Agency had now developed programs to recruit contacts of these officials.

At one point I was given the task of trying to plan how to recruit a member of the Chinese diplomatic installation. Here I was, thousands of miles away, sitting in my chair, gazing lazily out the window at the flag, planning the best way to contact and assess the target individual. I half-heartedly played the game and set forth my new plan in a dispatch to the field station. This plan born in my not-very-fertile imagination was full of flaws. However, the deputy desk chief carefully considered it for a week or so and then the desk chief did the same. Then I was called in. They were not quite sure the plan would work as outlined, so we held a series of discussions, modified the plan, and sent it forward in great solemnity for consideration by the deputy chief and chief of China activities. After appropriate consideration and delay, they held a series of discussions with my desk chief. He brought the dispatch back to me for incorporation of their ideas. I sent the reworked dispatch back through the same channels and the chief of China activities thankfully, after further thought, decided that the time was not right to attempt the recruitment.

Some people, however, regarded operations against China as a great struggle to oppose the Communist madman Mao Tse-tung. We were the guys in the white hats chasing—to recruit
as our agents—the guys in the black hats, the Chinese Communists. We tried to recruit them on planes, in toilets, in diplomatic talks, anywhere. But the bad guys never seemed to appreciate that they were the bad and we were the good. We lost, they won. Several hundred case officers scattered throughout the world backed up by a timeless Headquarters bureaucracy pondered and schemed how to recruit that one Chinese official.

If you stayed long enough in China activities, you experienced a sense of
déjà vu
. The same things happened year after year. A top official of China activities would develop a brilliant new plan on how to recruit a Chinese Communist. This plan invigorated everyone, and dispatches were sent to all field installations ordering implementation of the idea. The field case officers, caught up in the excitement, urgently acted to put the plan into effect. After a year or so and with no discernible results, another bureaucrat would develop another brilliant plan. Ultimately the cycle repeated itself, and the new plan was merely a rerun of one that had failed several years earlier.

My evaluation of the performance record of the China activities people is even more negative than that given by a former chief of station, Peer de Silva, in his book,
Sub Rosa
. He writes:

I find it hard to write about our intelligence work based in Hong Kong against mainland China because there was very little successful intelligence work done, in fact. Much was attempted and much failed. We had two main intelligence targets: the uranium gaseous-diffusion plant under construction at Lanchow and the plutonium plant at Pao Tou, both in north-central China. We wanted to learn the state of construction of these two important scientific enterprises, to determine when they went into full production and the amount of purity of their nuclear products. We accomplished neither, nor had my predecessors, and, as I understand it, neither did my successors. The advent of photographic satellites later in the 1960's, however, changed that bleak picture markedly, but that all took place after my tour in Hong Kong.

It was small solace later to learn that this high-expectation, low-yield experience was not mine alone. Mainland China was simply a difficult target for intelligence penetration on the ground with human agents. We had some minor successes but “minor” was the word.
²

Some bureaucrats had built their careers around China activities and had a vested interest in continuing operations against China. There was an unrecognized danger in that game, for these people had to sustain the impression of China as an implacable foe of the United States. From at least the early 1970s the Chinese Communists supported a strong NATO and a unified Europe as a counter to what they called Soviet Socialist Imperialism. China's position on NATO and Nixon's trip to Peking caused problems in China operations. How could they continue to portray China as the main enemy when it had adopted our policy and hosted our President? The answer was simple: they ignored events and continued the game. Several examples illustrate the point.

In the mid-1970s when I was working for the international communism branch, China desk asked me to brief the new chief of a European security service on the Marxist-Leninist movement's splinter Communist parties in Europe and their relationship to the Chinese. It instructed me to portray the Chinese Communists as foes because it wanted his service to help us in operations against the Chinese. I was only one of a series of briefers. The chief of the service seemed bored and did not ask a single question. When my turn came, having little fear since I planned to retire at the first opportunity, I gave him my honest assessment of China's foreign policy. He came to life and asked numerous questions and requested that I be made available for a second session. That was the last time China desk permitted me to brief its guests.

At about the same time, the CIA acquired a document of approximately 40 pages covering a briefing by top Chinese officials to a trusted and highly regarded ally. The briefing covered China's long-range policy toward two continents with separate sections on short-range actions in individual countries. Yet when it reached me, I noticed that comments on the internal routing sheet indicated the reports section of China desk had no interest in disseminating the document. Dumbfounded that the information had been rejected, I routed it back to China desk, suggesting it might want to reconsider. Several weeks later the document found its way back to me with a notation from the China desk that it had no plans to disseminate the information. A document that set forth China's intentions—the most difficult and highly desired
information on an important country's policy—but we did not want it? Why? Because it showed that China planned to act in a responsible way and that its goals to a large extent paralleled our own. Our operational warriors realized that if they disseminated the report, it might stimulate some government leaders to question the CIA's insistence that China deserved to be on the top of its operational target list.

Case officers developed a very personal interest in keeping China as one of the primary enemies of the United States. Promotions, foreign travel, and assignments abroad all depended on maintaining that concept. Once, in the middle of one of Washington's hottest summers, we learned that a Chinese Communist planned to attend a conference at a cool, expensive overseas summer resort. The chief of one desk of China activities decided to try to contact the official to assess his recruitment potential. She went on an extended temporary duty assignment to that resort area, where she spent her time relaxing by the hotel's pool, dining in its best restaurants, and appearing at other swish spots where the Chinese official might surface and be prompted to speak to her. After several unsuccessful weeks of this hardship duty, she returned to the torrid Washington weather.

I had still not given up on my deepest concerns. I tried to explain the district surveys to the Far East division. William E. Nelson had replaced Colby as division chief, and I thought Nelson may not have had the opportunity to learn about the surveys. I prepared a memorandum covering the survey procedures and routed it to the plans people of the division. They returned it with the comment that I had no jurisdiction in matters concerning Thailand.

I then contacted the suggestion and achievement awards committee, which I had learned of when I had checked back into Headquarters in late 1967. The check-in sheet noted that employees who had developed any unique ideas or procedures for improving performance that might have Agency-wide application should submit them for consideration by the committee. Any suggestion adopted for general use might earn the employee a monetary or honorary award. The check-in sheet
also said that a special panel had been established to consider suggestions dealing with covert operations. I spoke with the chief of the committee, and he recommended that I prepare a formal suggestion under the provisions of the special panel.

I did so, describing the survey process and noting the evaluation it had received from United States and Thai government agencies. The panel routed the suggestion to the Far East division to evaluate. The division rejected the proposal. Finding it impossible to believe that the division would knowingly reject a program that at little expense both stopped the insurgency and provided excellent intelligence, I rewrote the suggestion. I located copies of the intelligence reports produced by the survey and attached those old reports to the expanded suggestion and submitted it again to the special panel.

Several weeks went by before the chief of the Thai desk, whom I shall call Bart, asked me to come down and see him. Bart and I had served together in Thailand, and I considered him to be the ideal CIA officer. He was down-to-earth, one of the boys, yet he had progressed rapidly up the Agency's chain of command. He worked hard, played hard, and kept his perspective when in a position of authority. (I later learned that when the Agency planned to lower the boom on an employee, it traditionally gave that unpleasant duty to an official most respected by that employee.)

Bart was alone and asked me to sit down. We exchanged a little small talk, but it was evident that he was quite upset. He said, “You know that your suggestion has caused considerable problems here in the division.”

This was news to me. My purpose was to help the division, the Agency, and the United States, not to cause problems.

“Mr. Nelson is most upset,” Bart continued. “He said you have not gone through the proper channels and have conducted an end run around the division.”

Jesus Christ, I thought, what now? Here was the best counterinsurgency program to come down the pike, I try to make the division aware of it, and this is what happens.

Looking sheepish and uncomfortable, Bart said, “Mr. Nelson wants me to tell you that you have jeopardized all future promotions by your actions.”

He then sat there waiting for some reaction. I stared at him in disbelief. A hundred thoughts flashed through my
mind. I finally mumbled something like, “I thought I was helping the division. You know what the surveys accomplished.”

He said something, but my mind was far away. I stood up, looked at him, and tried to think of something to say. I couldn't, so I turned and walked out.