Deadly Deceits (28 page)

Another example of CIA image-bungling relates to one of its sore spots—the exposure of Agency personnel operating under various types of cover. The Agency howls at the exposure of its overseas personnel by its number one antagonist, Philip Agee, a former employee who writes books about the CIA. But the Agency often facilitates that identification. On one occasion in Thailand, the chief of station planned an all-employee party to be held in his home. It was a large house with a swimming pool known to all knowledgeable Thais as the home of the CIA's chief of station. The chief of one branch
[one word deleted]
of the station pleaded that his cover-sensitive subordinates should not be forced to attend. He noted that the local police guided the traffic and parking for the celebrants and that they most likely kept a record of the license plates of the attendees. He won the argument temporarily. But to his dismay the chief of station decided to hold two parties, one for those under light cover and another for those under deeper cover. What little concealment might have
been provided by the single party was lost by this convenient separation into two groups.

Paramilitary
. In the early 1950s the CIA's creation and support of the Police Aerial Reconnaissance Unit (PARU) in Thailand was a model for paramilitary operations. General Edward Lansdale's 1961 memorandum on unconventional warfare explained: “The PARU has a mission of undertaking clandestine operations in denied areas. 99 PARU personnel have been introduced covertly to assist the Meos [Hmong] in operations in Laos.… This is a special police unit supported by CIA … with a current strength of 300 being increased to 550 as rapidly as possible.… There are presently 13 PARU teams, totaling 99 men, operating with the Meo guerrillas in Laos.”
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From Lansdale's description it is evident that the CIA used PARU as an extension of its own paramilitary officers and to conceal its own role. The CIA apparently could not motivate Laotians to fight for us, so it substituted the Hmong hill tribers. The CIA recruited those mountain tribesmen and used PARU to lead them in fighting the Communist Pathet Lao forces.

Over the years this “secret war” grew into a major conflagration. It became more a conventional war with artillery bombardments, aerial bombing, and big unit movements. All that effort was linked by a massive CIA support and transportation complex.

As in Vietnam the CIA refused to acknowledge the real nature of the Communist Pathet Lao. Through PARU and the Hmong it developed an army loyal to the United States and dependent upon the CIA. But without a commitment by the Laotians, the CIA's private army finally in 1975 succumbed to the reality of the overwhelmingly superior Pathet Lao forces. The Hmong who cooperated with the CIA are now a dying tribe. The war destroyed their young men. Remnants of their tribe now live an impoverished, uncertain existence in refugee camps in Thailand.

In another ill-fated paramilitary operation, the CIA supported the 4,500-man Border Patrol Police in Thailand. According to General Lansdale's memorandum cited above, the BPP's mission was “to cope with problems posed by foreign guerrilla elements using Thailand as a safe haven: the
Vietminh in eastern Thailand and the Chinese Communists along the Malayan border in the south.”
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But that rationale was specious because the Viet Minh had dissolved in the mid-1950s and even then it had never operated in eastern Thailand or anywhere at all in that country. The Chinese Communists also did not operate in Thailand or along the Malayan border.

As Lansdale noted in his memorandum, over the years the mission of the BPP changed to: “counter infiltration and subversion during peace-time, in addition to normal police duties, in the event of an armed invasion of Thailand, the BPP will operate as guerrilla forces in enemy-held areas, in support of regular Thai armed forces.”
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Clearly all CIA rationale for supporting the BPP was based on false premises, not at all unusual in the secrecy-protected isolation of Agency bureaucracy.

External Operations
. These were operations conducted in Thailand to gather information on third countries.
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operations branch
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of Thailand station conducted intelligence-collection activities aimed at the
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Communist government.

Thailand station, bigger than many others, tried to recruit agents to go to
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from among the extensive
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community.
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case officers necessarily developed their own conceptual blindness. Locating a
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traveling to
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, contacting, recruiting, training, and dispatching him is a difficult and time-consuming task, while the result of the total effort is negligible—a report on the situation in the agent's native village, the rice production, the attitude of the people, and sights seen traveling from the village. When balanced against the totality of
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, the information was valueless.

Political Commentary
. The Thailand station was a top producer of political commentary, but this reporting created opportunities and pressures for unethical practices. I frequently saw case officers get a news tidbit, add a few references to earlier reports, and with flair and imagination embellish the item into a full-blown intelligence report. One of the most widespread abuses of this sort was coup reporting. The Thais' biennial semi-coups and the station's own creative activities caused Thailand station, like many others around the world,
to fall into a reporting cycle on potential coups d'état. In CIA reporting a group emerges, plans a coup, postpones the coup several times, and then fades from sight. Each stage in the coup cycle spawns its own series of intelligence reports. Most often no coup occurs, so in CIA reporting the same or a new coup group simply repeats the cycle. A case officer develops a symbiotic relationship with his agent, who perceives what information is wanted and may invent or create the necessary information. If, however, the information is genuine and a coup overturns the government, a station sometimes is caught by surprise in mid-cycle. With the new government comes a rash of counter-coup reports. Through this type of collection or imagination, a station's political officers always have the most reports.

But of course coup reporting can lead to absurdities like the one John Stockwell described in his book,
In Search of Enemies
. Stockwell said that as a case officer on an early first tour he found an agent, KRNEUTRON/1 (N-1), living a life of penniless indolence. Stockwell recruited N-1 to be his eyes and ears in the country. Stockwell pressed N-1 to produce intelligence. “Are you sure there is no coup plotting? What about your cousin, the late President's son?” asked Stockwell. N-1 talked to his cousin, and sure enough he was dissatisfied with the regime. From there a coup took root, and at least in Agency reporting, grew to large proportions. Headquarters was delighted with the intelligence and authorized bonuses, ignoring that the plotters were all immature youths. The plot was discovered by government authorities, and N-1 spent seven years in jail. Stockwell was young at the time and sincerely believed he was only collecting intelligence. It never occurred to him until later that he had formulated the plot.
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Stockwell's story is not unique. The same thing, with many variants, happened again and again throughout much of the world while the Agency reported volumes of self-contrived intelligence that made it look good to the President and his national security advisers.

I now recognized most of the Agency's problems in these various areas. Watching the fantasies of Agency “intelligence” operations caused my blood to boil. I was in a permanent state of distress, but I regarded my tour in Thailand as just a way to pass the time until I could retire. Sometimes I thought back to
my football playing days at Notre Dame. Then I had been able to try my best, put my entire being into the game, feel the satisfaction of striving, working, and winning. But now on my job it was impossible to win. If you tried, you were beaten down by any one of many bureaucratic devices, and all you could do was swallow and pretend.

I still felt we should try to stop the spread of the Communist Party of Thailand and that to do so we first had to recognize its composition. Recognizing its true structure and nature, of course, would ultimately lead to acknowledging the true structures and natures of the Laotian, the Vietnamese, and by now also the Cambodian communist movements. If we did this, I now realized, the only sensible policy would be to withdraw our forces immediately from those countries—or to drop nuclear bombs on the people. I felt that if we were spending millions of dollars in Thailand building up the strength of the Thai military, we should at least try to report accurately on the communist insurgency it was supposed to be fighting. But having lost that battle before in Vietnam and earlier in Thailand, I decided to try to keep my peace and observe the ongoing fantasy.

Early on in this tour I met with some of the Thais who had worked with me three years earlier on the survey operations. A station officer asked me to visit his area upcountry to help him build good relations with the Thais, especially Colonel Chat Chai of the police, who had led the management team of the surveys. I traveled to Udorn in the Northeast, where a group of police officers were having a large dinner party for some Americans. It was held on a roof-garden of a local hotel with a small band providing the usual bad background music. Colonel Chat Chai seemed glad to see me and found a quiet table where he, the station officer, and I could talk. The colonel was a changed man. Before he had worked long, hard hours eschewing any diversions; now he was the opposite. The station officer had told me earlier that the colonel had a mistress and spent much of his time relaxing and enjoying life. The colonel was the first to admit the change.

“Before, the police collected intelligence on the
communists,” he said. “Now that job has been taken away from us. If the communists cause an incident, I or one of my men will go out and walk around, and that's all. Others are supposed to take care of the problem, so I don't bother.”

In becoming a cynic, Colonel Chat Chai had lost his giggle and had picked up some of the Thai evasions and circumlocutions. The all-powerful Thai military had taken over the responsibility for counterinsurgency and intelligence. This was the “others” he referred to.

He asked me, “What do you do? Any plans to start the surveys again?”

“Hell, I tried back at Headquarters and then in Vietnam to get the surveys going,” I responded, “but people just aren't interested. So I just do what they tell me and pass the time of day the best I can. I started studying Thai again and it helps me keep my mind off what is going on.”

We talked freely like this for hours. The CIA officer did not benefit from my visit and probably wished that I had stayed away. Colonel Chat Chai and I had both realized the futility of additional effort. We sadly wished each other goodbye.

One day Lieutenant Somboon, the leader of the survey teams, came to the station to see me. For security reasons, station employees were not allowed to bring foreign nationals into our offices, so Somboon and I went down to the first-floor cafeteria. Somboon was still searching for answers.

“I am stationed in the South now,” he said, “and we have a big insurgency there. I try to tell the people about the surveys, but they don't pay any attention. The surveys did so good I don't sure why they stopped. I talked to your people, but they don't know about the surveys. Do you plan to get them started again?”

Lieutenant Somboon, who had been so full of energy, ideas, suggestions, and plans, now seemed only troubled. I could do nothing to help him. The Thais who looked to us for advice on counterinsurgency had dropped the surveys because we had. “But I can't do anything about it,” I said, “because I lack influence.”

I looked at the confusion on his face, and I assume he read the pain in mine. In other times we would have spent hours talking and planning; now there was nothing to say. After a half hour we parted.

Another day I was sitting in the downstairs cafeteria drinking coffee when I spotted Jimmy Moe, the model warrior from my paramilitary training years before, standing just outside the glass-paneled rear door. He appeared to be in abject misery. Here was the man of indefatigable energy looking totally defeated. I thought I knew why. I was sure that he had come to regard himself as a Judas goat. For like that stockyard villain, he had led his followers to their destruction. The Hmong, whom he had led in Laos during our long battle with the Pathet Lao, were a dying tribe. (I wonder how the CIA officers now leading the Miskito Indians to fight in Nicaragua will regard themselves in ten years.) The Laotian war decimated the young men of the Hmong, and at this point it was all but lost. Jimmy appeared so downcast and broken that I held back from jumping up and saying hello. He might have sensed my gaze, for he looked up at me and recognition flashed in his eyes, immediately followed by a return to the look of pain. We contemplated each other, and a thousand thoughts passed unspoken between us. To try to renew our friendship would be nothing but painful. He turned away as I got up to leave.

One day just before Christmas 1971, as Norma, Dan, and I were about to leave the apartment to go to the beach at Hua Hin, we decided to call Scott. We finally got through and it was good to hear his voice. I jokingly said, “Why don't you come on back?” He responded, “Oh, if I only could.” Taken by surprise, I asked if he really meant it. He said, “Yes, things are different than I thought, and I'd like a second chance.”

“Great!” I yelled. “I can't do anything for a few days, but as soon as we get back from Hua Hin, I will make arrangements here.” We wished him a merry Christmas, and those few days at Hua Hin were filled with the joyful anticipation of getting our older son back.