Laughter in the Shadows (10 page)

The Agency has a mixed nation-building record, lauded for toppling unsavory dictators like Mohammad Mossadegh and castigated for its alleged role in assassinating the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba and the overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende.

Cham was the Agency’s covert-action Thermopylae.
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Battle in 480 BC, when a small force of Spartans fought to the last man, holding off the entire Persian army.

CHAPTER 6:
Cham, Nation Building

We were a self-centered army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom . . . a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded In Its glare.

—T. E. LAWRENCE, Seven
Pillars of Wisdom

B
ards recounting the idylls of the Agency will dwell on Cham, where, in unequaled acts of courage and despair, the CIA had its finest hour.

The idyll began in the summer of 1959. Clutching Langley’s guidons, we rode into Cham. Our motives and expectations, illusory and naive as they may have been, were in joint with the time. Cham was “our oyster,” and we believed we could make a difference there. It was a young country, unencumbered by ancient régimes, Hapsburg intrigues, or Bourbon plots.

Cham was a political action frontier, where we shed cloaks and daggers for civic action garb and nation-building tool kits. We operated in the open, because there was little cover, no place to hide, no secrets that wouldn’t come out, no “plausible denial.”

During the late 1950s, the Cold War was at its height. In Washington the prevailing doctrine, promulgated by John Foster Dulles, secretary of state and brother of CIA director Allen Dulles, was that the Soviet Union and Communist China were plotting the takeover of Southeast Asia. The doctrine that, if one Southeast Asian country fell to the communists, the others would soon topple became known as the “Domino Theory.”

The Geneva settlement in 1954 had already opened the door to the communist takeover of North Vietnam. To stem the tide, the United States sent arms and advisers to shore up South Vietnam. The other country in the way of the communists was Cham.

In 1950 the newly elected U.S. president, wary of being drawn into a war in Southeast Asia, affirmed support for the “neutrality” of Cham. At the same time, the North Vietnamese stepped up their covert operations. The “Red Prince” Souphong, had earlier been imprisoned by the Cham government until he escaped with his jailers to North Vietnam, reinfiltrated Cham, and set up his base in his home province of Sap Neua.

The communist incursions set off alarm bells in Washington and resurrected the Domino Theory. J. Campbell, an Agency officer, told me he had been summoned to a briefing in 1959 in the director’s office. According to Campbell, Allen Dulles, standing in front of a map of Asia pointing to Cham, said, “Gentlemen, there’s a fire burning out there!”
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Allen Dulles had fired the starting gun in the race to save Southeast Asia.

The Land of a Million Elephants

Time, as we all know, is sometimes a bird on the wing, and sometimes a crawling worm, but men are happiest when oblivious of time’s quick or slow pace.

—W. TREVOR,
Reading Turgenev

Cham is landlocked, isolated, and backward. Its people are laid back, gentle, and easygoing. Most of the country is mountainous, although there are two sprawling plains, one in the north and one in the south.

The northern plain is a broad steppe, ringed by obsidian cliffs and covered with elephant grass. Huge prehistoric urn-shaped boulders lie scattered over this Asian Stonehenge, known as La Plaine des Jarres, the Plain of Jars. The savanna to the south was the former hunting preserve of Cham satraps and French gouverneurs. Elephants still lumber across the plain under watchful eyes of wild boars, buffalo, and tigers.

The lowland Cham who inhabit the valleys are Buddhists and survive on sticky rice. These valley dwellers are peaceful and lethargic except during the equinox or summer solstice, when the advent of fertility rites turn them into frenzied Cham copulators.

The highlanders, or montagnards, live in thatched stilted huts on slash-and-burn plots that have been hacked out of the surrounding forest. Fierce warriors, they hunt with crossbows and drink fermented wine. Their staple crop is the opium poppy.

Cham has two capitals. The seat of government is in Viensiang, a sleepy town lying along the Mekong River across from neighboring Thailand. The royal capital, Luang Prabat, is up in the mountains and, at the time I lived there, boasted the world’s only monarch who drove a Ford Edsel.

That the Cham are fatalists is not surprising. Their country has been invaded by tribes of Mongols, Chinese hordes, Vietnamese marauders, and the French, die-hard colonials backed by their Foreign Legion.

In 1954 the French were defeated by Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu and Cham became an independent country. Unfortunately, its borders as well as those of Vietnam and Cambodia, were drawn by European bureaucrats, and this explains why the people of Cham have no sense of a “national identity.”

Henry

That glorious vision of doing good, which is so often the sanguine marriage of so many good minds, arose before him, and he even saw himself in the illusion of some influence.

—CHARLES DICKENS,
Tale of Two Cities

That there was even a Station in bucolic Cham was an anomaly. Only when the KGB set up shop in Viensiang did the CIA decide to follow suit. The small espionage outpost remained an operational backwater until the arrival of its new station chief, Henry.

Henry was an old European hand who had several operational coups to his credit, including the tunnel under East Berlin and the defrocking of a KGB station chief. Eventually, Henry tired of Europe, where most of his case officers were OSS retreads and their agents shopworn refugees and unsavory defectors. When Henry heard about the opening in Viensiang, he sensed the country was an operational lode waiting to be mined and volunteered for the post.

Detractors at Headquarters were concerned that Henry’s Teutonic character would grate on the easygoing Cham. The director, however, an old friend of Henry’s, was confident the dynamic Prussian would win over even the lethargic Cham.

Henry caused a stir shortly after he arrived. Instead of keeping a “low profile,” he let the Cham know his office was open for business. Clients began coming to his door, and Henry soon developed a number of government officials and young army officers.

Henry’s openness with the Cham grated on the American ambassador, a corpulent political appointee who took great pride in his karate black belt, which he hung on the wall behind his desk. It irritated the ambassador that Henry lived outside Viensiang on the airport road, which made it difficult to contact him on short notice.

The electricity outside Viensang was erratic and unreliable, and Henry had a backup generator installed at his house. When the Chinese madam who ran “the house” next door asked Henry to leave his generator on at night for her late clients, Henry agreed. And in return for letting her tap into his generator, he asked her to provide information on some of her clients.

Henry lived on the airport road for only a few months before the ambassador ordered him to move into town nearer the embassy. Henry had no choice, and he turned his house over to a newly arrived case officer and his wife, Brenda Lou, a strict Southern Baptist, who had only agreed to come to Cham to protect her husband from Asian fleshpots.

Her husband was often away on field trips, and Brenda Lou became increasingly irritated at the noise from the generator in the shed out back. One night the throbbing noise so infuriated Brenda Lou that she stomped out to the shed and threw the switch to shut off the generator.

Unbeknownst to Brenda Lou, she plunged the entire airport road into darkness. The tap from the generator to the madam’s “house” was only one of a series of taps into the line by noodle and cigarette shops along the airport road, the last tap at the Buddhist temple Wat Phrasay faintly lighting the one lamp flickering above the inner courtyard.

The morning after Brenda Lou threw the switch, an angry saffron-robed monk, the “Venerable Bonze” from the Buddhist wat on the airport road, stormed into the ambassador’s office in the embassy. Rapping his cane on the floor, the Venerable Bonze berated the ambassador for shutting off power to a Buddhist shrine while the monks were praying.

The ambassador assured the bonze he would take action. He called Henry in and told him to turn that “damn generator” back on and leave it on!

Henry later claimed credit for the most successful electrical power project since the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority).

More serious matters lay ahead for Henry. In 1959 the slumbering Cham were again rousted from their hibernation. Armed Pathet Cham cadre, trained in North Vietnam, were infiltrating into northern Cham. With little government presence in the area, the infiltrations went unreported until an alert outpost commander picked up “bamboo telegraph” clackings announcing the “return of our brothers from the North.”

The clackings were reported to Viensiang, and Henry’s military intelligence contact briefed him on the reports. Henry cabled the gist of the report to Headquarters, flagging it for the director’s attention. Henry added his own comment that the report was evidence that the Pathet Cham intended to gain control of Cham. It would achieve this goal by infiltrating Moscow-trained cadre into Cham, establishing bases in the two northern provinces to serve as springboards to take over the whole of Cham. Henry concluded, “The Cham government, still weak from a
bungled French Caesarean and viral Marxist infection, was paralyzed and unable to take action to remedy its maladies since it was run by ‘colonial leftovers.’”

Henry concluded that only a hard-hitting political action program could save Cham.

Headquarters, accustomed to dramatic pronouncements from Henry, usually treated them as “wolf cries” from a pastured-out station chief. In reply to this latest cable, Headquarters insisted Henry provide details on numbers of armed Pathet Cham cadre, specific routes and infiltration points, and evidence that North Vietnam and the USSR were providing aid to the Pathet Cham.

Henry’s detractors had not, however, taken into account the director’s reaction to Henry’s cable. Allen Dulles had a high regard for Henry, as both had entered the Agency around the same time. Both men had distinguished themselves in World War II, Dulles brokering peace talks with Galeazzo Ciano, Benito Mussolini’s son-in-law, and Henry spiriting nuclear scientists out of Germany.

Henry’s cable intrigued the director, who called the Far East Division chief and asked for an immediate briefing on Cham.

Prior to the director’s phone call, there had been little interest in the landlocked kingdom in former Indochina. When the division chief called Friedman, the Headquarters officer responsible for Cham, and told him to report to the director’s office to give a briefing, Friedman ran up all seven flights of stairs to the director’s office.

Allen Dulles sat behind a long, curved mahogany desk, flanked on either side by American and CIA flags. Friedman, without waiting for instructions, went directly to the director’s desk and unrolled a map of Cham. He anchored the corners of the map with opium weights Henry had sent shortly after his arrival in Cham.

Friedman pointed out the two provinces in question and the infiltration routes highlighted by Magic Marker lightning bolts. Dulles pored over the map, then asked Friedman about the political situation, the capability of the Cham army, the reliability of Cham intelligence sources, and the practicability of mounting operations in a country as backward and underdeveloped as Cham.