Shadow Warrior (36 page)

Instead of enabling Khanh to tighten his grip on South Vietnam, his state of emergency decree and the attempted purge of the Dai Viet weakened it. On August 24, 1964, the Buddhists and their student allies took to the streets, staging massive demonstrations. Caught between the Buddhists and the pro–Dai Viet generals, Khanh sought to appease the former. He promised Buddhist leader Tri Quang constitutional reform, early elections, and freedom of both religion and speech. Catholic youth then rioted, and the dissident generals moved in for the kill. In February 1965, Nguyen Khanh resigned and accepted a post as roving ambassador.

As Saigon writhed in the coils of palace intrigue, political theater, and coup plots, the CIA station, with Colby monitoring and encouraging it, proceeded with a series of counterinsurgency/pacification incubators in the countryside.
⁶⁹

In the aftermath of the 1963 coup that toppled the Diem regime, Lodge and one of his counterinsurgency officers, Everett Bumgardner, had sent a young United States Information Service officer named Frank Scotton into Long An Province, only 40 miles south of Saigon. Long An was a Viet Cong hotbed, despite its proximity to the capital, and Scotton's task was to survey the situation and come up with a counterinsurgency initiative to combat the communists. To this end, he recruited a handful of Americans to go with him to live among the peasants, and they created “armed propaganda teams,” essentially to do what the Viet Cong were doing—fighting by night and recruiting followers by day. With the Long An experiment up and running, Saigon dispatched Scotton and Captain Robert Kelly to Quang Ngai Province on the Central Coast and instructed them to replicate the armed propaganda teams. Impressed by Scotton's work in Long An, Colby and de Silva decided to adopt the program, hoping that it could eventually be applied throughout South Vietnam. From that point on, Scotton and his comrades had access to CIA money and CIA-operated warehouses containing arms, food, medicine, and building supplies.
⁷⁰

De Silva also ordered that aid and advice be given to Nguyen Van Buu, a Catholic businessman who exercised a virtual monopoly on the shrimp and cinnamon trade in the south. The CIA station helped train more than five hundred “shrimp and cinnamon soldiers,” who, in turn, were largely responsible for keeping the highway from Saigon to the port of Vung Tau
open.
⁷¹
Another CIA-sponsored operative, ARVN lieutenant colonel Do Van Dien, established armed defense teams in, among other places, a Catholic convent and a leper colony situated in the communist-infested Zone D north of Saigon. By far the most significant initiative supported by the station, however, was Major Tran Ngoc Chau's comprehensive pacification program in Kien Hoa Province, another Viet Cong hotbed located southeast of Long An. Chau, a former Viet Minh who had rallied to Diem, but had grown increasingly disillusioned with Saigon's repressive policies, had become province chief in 1962.

The situation in Kien Hoa when Chau assumed control was bleak. Station officers who overflew the province in early 1964 had noticed that where once there had been sizable strategic hamlets, there was now nothing left but bare earth. The Viet Cong had dispersed the population and taken everything else. At this point, military activity against the communists consisted of ARVN sweeps coupled with harassing air and artillery bombardment. There was no concerted effort to carry the war to the enemy, to identify Viet Cong cadres and installations, or to infiltrate their safe areas in order to harass and destroy. De Silva dispatched Stuart Methven, a CIA operations officer, to act as adviser to Chau.

What Methven and Chau came up with were Counter-Terror (CT) Teams trained and armed by the US Special Forces. The first fifteen-man units were, Chau admitted, drawn from “deserters and small time crooks, currently in refuge with one of the district chiefs.” Once they were well armed (and well paid), the CT Teams proved fairly effective and surprisingly loyal. Indeed, Viet Cong leaflets offered 15,000 piasters for the killing of a US adviser or South Vietnamese district chief; 20,000 piasters for an ARVN officer; and 40,000 piasters for a CT cadre. The war in Kien Hoa became quite personal and specific. A Viet Cong sniper assassinated the US adviser to the ARVN Ranger unit in the province, and communist propaganda lionized the shooter. This could not stand, Chau decided, and a CT Team, after pinpointing the man's location, grenaded his hut, killing him and his family.
⁷²

The objective in Kien Hoa, de Silva wrote to Colby, was to “increase results to a level at which they [are] not merely psychological but actually affect [Viet Cong] military and political effectiveness.”
⁷³
More significant, Chau developed and implemented what he dubbed the “Census-Grievance Program.” Members of his counterinsurgency force would move throughout
the province conducting a thorough census, and in the process they would encourage villagers to list their grievances against both the Viet Cong and the government. Chau and his men made it clear that they understood that before the people could be expected to support their government and its soldiers, they would have to show themselves to be nurturers rather than exploiters.

In November, de Silva visited Quang Ngai and was electrified by what he found. The experiment initiated by Frank Scotton and Robert Kelly and supported by the resident CIA officer was flourishing. Quang Ngai, in Military Region IV, was the southernmost province of Vietnam. (The military regime in Saigon had divided South Vietnam into four military regions, with I being the northernmost and IV the southernmost.) It was a gorgeous area, with the Annamite Range descending from the west to the coastal lowlands and the South China Sea. The area had been a Viet Minh stronghold since World War II but was also the redoubt of one of Vietnam's oldest noncommunist, nationalist parties, the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang. The province chief was a VNQDD member and a strong supporter of the CIA-funded counterinsurgency/pacification incubator. The small, armed propaganda teams that Scotton and Kelly had started with had morphed into 40-man units that, while putting on pro–South Vietnamese government plays and building village infrastructure, were inflicting heavy casualties on the local Viet Cong. The teams elected their own leaders and had no fixed installations. According to the provincial MACV adviser, between June and October these units, now named People's Action Teams (PATs), had killed 167 of the enemy and captured 236 others along with large caches of weapons. PAT losses were 6 killed and 22 wounded with no desertions. The PATs would move through the province, living in a particular village for three days while dispensing medicine, giving out seed, helping with various construction projects, and gathering information on the Viet Cong. Then they would move on until the entire province had been covered. The following year, a PAT unit in Binh Son District of Quang Ngai Province provided intelligence and scouting services to a US Marine battalion that led to the destruction of more than 600 enemy troops. According to Stu Methven, de Silva returned to Saigon looking “as if he had found God.” The chief of station was now a committed convert to the Colby cause, but he soon found himself butting his head against the same wall as his predecessor.
⁷⁴

When de Silva presented the PATs as the solution to the counterinsurgency/pacification program to the US Mission Council, he found Westmoreland “less than enthusiastic,” as he put it. The general's staff saw the chief of station's recommendations as an indictment of the military's efforts in the field and just another power grab by the Agency, another attempt to build its own private army. In frustration, de Silva appealed to headquarters. The PATs were the solution to the problem, he wrote to Colby. If the rapidly growing Viet Cong penetration and domination of the rural population were not halted and reversed, it would not matter how well trained and well equipped the ARVN was. The suppression of the Viet Cong had to be seen as a “psychological, political, and spiritual war which distinguishes the war here from classical war, and which I am convinced is susceptible to solution by civil and civic actions spawned in the local populations.” This from a West Point graduate and former army colonel.
⁷⁵

This was all music to Colby's ears, and he made a forceful presentation to McCone and Helms. Headquarters gave the go-ahead to de Silva to expand the PAT program, and during his February 1965 visit to Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy provided the NSC's stamp of approval. MACV reluctantly acquiesced on the condition that the program not drain off the military's best and brightest. Plans were developed to apply the PAT concept in Binh Dinh and Phu Yen Provinces, and Westmoreland paid the program the compliment of asking Frank Scotton to raise up local self-defense forces in the districts around Saigon.

Although Colby was enthusiastic about the People's Action Team program, he was the first to see its limitations. De Silva conceived of counterinsurgency and pacification much as Ed Lansdale had a decade earlier. If the South Vietnamese government and its American advisers could deny the enemy access to the masses of peasants who inhabited the countryside, the Viet Cong would wither on the vine. In this, de Silva assumed that South Vietnam's peasants were innately anticommunist and that the Viet Cong held sway principally through the use of terror. Not so, Colby observed to McCone and Helms. The South Vietnamese government and its friends had to fill the void with something positive. There had to be programs of social and economic justice—permanent programs—and a degree of self-determination at the village level. In other words, there had to be something positive for the local people to fight for. Also, who would
defend the villagers when the PATs moved on? But the PATs were a start, and Colby limited his criticisms to the inner circle at Langley.
⁷⁶

Unfortunately for counterinsurgency and pacification, South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse by early 1965. A newly constituted Military Revolutionary Council, dominated by ARVN chief of staff Nguyen Van Thieu and Air Force marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, had replaced Khanh. Paying lip service to civilian control of the government, the generals named Phan Huy Quat, a prominent Dai Viet politician, to the post of prime minister. These comings and goings in Saigon were accompanied by a sharply deteriorating security situation in the countryside. On February 7, 1965, the Viet Cong attacked the US air base at Pleiku in the Central Highlands, killing eight Americans and destroying a number of aircraft. National Security adviser McGeorge Bundy, then in-country, rushed to witness the carnage and sent an emotional report to the White House calling for direct American action. The Viet Cong followed up with a bombing of the US military barracks at Qui Nhon, killing twenty-three more GIs. On February 28, the CIA station in Saigon reported “an alarmingly rapid erosion of the GVN [South Vietnamese government] position” in Military Region II: “Provincial capitals and district towns have been progressively isolated (in some cases abandoned)—ARVN Regional and Popular Force units have been decimated in increasingly large scale actions. Finally, the Viet Cong have assumed effective control over more and more hamlets in the countryside.” Privately, CIA and Foreign Service officers in Saigon began discussing their next assignments.
⁷⁷

On March 2, the United States replaced its earlier ad hoc retaliatory raids against the north with a sustained bombing campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder. Anticipating Viet Cong attacks against US air bases in retaliation for the aerial assault, Westmoreland urgently requested two Marine landing teams to protect the air base at Danang. President Johnson reluctantly approved, and on March 8, two battalions of Marines, fitted out in full battle dress, with tanks and 8-inch howitzers, splashed ashore near Danang, where they were welcomed by South Vietnamese officials and a bevy of local beauties passing out leis of flowers. Neither Rolling Thunder nor the Marine landing did anything to stop the deteriorating situation in the countryside, however, and in mid-March, MACV requested two army divisions—one to be committed to the Central Highlands and the other to the Saigon area. These were to be main force units
capable of taking on the battalion-sized echelons the communists were now deploying.

On April 6, President Johnson authorized US ground forces to undertake offensive operations in Vietnam. In May, the Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade arrived in Central Vietnam; the 4th Marine Regiment then landed farther up the coast. The White House approved an additional 50,000 troops to be placed at Westmoreland's disposal and promised 50,000 more before the end of the year. The first major engagement took place in November when a brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division battled three North Vietnamese regiments in the Ia Drang Valley in the mountains of Military Region II.

Bill Colby understood the necessity of the United States sticking “its finger in the dike,” as Westmoreland had put it, but what then? “The main problem Washington faced was strategic,” he later wrote, “—its effort to fight its kind of war, a soldiers' war instead of the people's war the enemy was fighting.” The Johnson administration would soon discover, he feared, that main force units, artillery and air bombardment, and large-scale sweeps were irrelevant, even counterproductive. “The finger of Death [would point] too often at the very people who should have been our allies, not our enemies,” he later wrote. The war would be won or lost in the bush, at the village, even at the individual level. Following a particularly intense White House meeting on Vietnam, Colby approached McGeorge Bundy and asked for a word in private. He recommended that instead of finetuning the bombing of the north or discussing the next increment of US combat forces to be sent to the south, the foreign policy establishment focus on the real problem: how to meet the communist challenge at the village level. Bundy replied, “You may be right, Bill, but the structure of the American Government probably won't permit it.”
⁷⁸