JFK (22 page)

It had long been the custom for each farm family to go to the village and pile their baskets of rice beside the others. Each farmer, by long custom, had a supply of small black sticks (about the size of Magic Markers) with his name or symbol on each stick, and he would place one in each of his baskets of rice. (None of these comparatively wealthy farmers had a broker or other system of marketing.)

On market day, the Chinese merchant would arrive in his large sampan. All of the rice baskets, removed from the village square, would be loaded onto his boat, at which time the village elder would collect all of the marker-sticks. The Chinese merchant then bought the rice, based upon the going price per basket multiplied by the number of sticks. In turn, the village elder bought from the merchant the salt, tools, fabrics, and other assorted needs from that account. If there was a balance to the credit of the village, the Chinese merchant paid it in silver coinage of intrinsic value. Each farmer benefitted according to the tally of his sticks.

This age-old system created the market for the farmer’s produce and provided him with the basic necessities of life in exchange for his labor—until the impact of the Diem edicts that ousted the French and the Chinese. The farmers from these many villages knew nothing about the edict or about the departure of the French and Chinese. Then came the first rice harvest and the first market day after the edict.

Thus, by market day, they had cut the rice, woven the baskets, poled the sampans into town, and placed their sticks in each basket in the village square. They had no telephones. They had no broker. They had no way of knowing that the Chinese merchant was not coming. Their harvests of rice rotted where they lay in baskets in the village.

What would you do with a crop if no marketing system existed to purchase it and there was no means to move it to a national or world market?

One crop cycle could pass, perhaps two or three, but eventually these villagers had to have necessities. In many of the villages, the greatest necessity was potable water. Even though they were knee-deep in brackish rice-paddy water all day, they frequently had to buy their drinking water. They bought it from the same Chinese merchants. After the Chinese left, when the villagers had no water, they had no place to go. When they did not get enough rainwater to fill the huge earthen jars every family owned for their supply of drinking water, they drank brackish water. They became ill. (Throughout history, water contamination has been one of the most effective weapons of war.)

So the stronger men of the village banded together to get water, salt, and the other necessities of life by the oldest means known to man: banditry. This was not political or criminal; it was not ideological. It was a last-resort effort to obtain simple and elementary needs. And one village attacked another in order to get water—to live.

This situation created a deadly, low-level, self-perpetuating turmoil. Diem’s fragile new country was falling apart in the most unlikely of places—in the regions that had always had the most prosperous farms and in the zones farthest from Hanoi. Unrest spread through the most fertile, most stable, and most wealthy regions of the new State of Vietnam. Back in Saigon, the Diem government and its American advisers were totally unaware of the true causes of this unrest, but they were ready with their Pavlovian interpretation. It was, they said, the result of “Communist subversion and insurgency.” Chronologically, this situation began to be identified and studied by the Americans at just the time that Kennedy became President. The concept of “counterinsurgency” had been heard in the Pentagon before the end of the Eisenhower administration; but it came into full flower with the arrival of the Kennedy administration.

The Americans’ only embarrassment, if they considered it at all, was that the most serious rioting was taking place in the southernmost regions of the State of Vietnam, those areas farthest from any appreciable “Communist” infiltration. The Diem government and its American advisers had created the causes of the rioting, but they wanted the rest of the world to believe otherwise. They had much bigger things in mind.

With no system of law and order to replace that used by the French, with no organized means of merchandising to replace that of the Chinese, and with no need for taxes because of the easy access to free-flowing American dollars, the Diem government was not close to the citizenry and had no idea what to do about the rioting, banditry, and boiling unrest. It turned to its American advisers for aid.

Meanwhile, all over South Vietnam, the rioting spread. The rice-producing villagers raced everywhere in a crazed search for essential necessities. They overran other communities—rubber plantations, fishing villages, lumber villages, etc.—in fierce, uncontrollable local battles.

All of this was seriously amplified by a different kind of trouble caused by the influx of the one million strangers from the north. These invaders needed the same things as their hosts: the basic necessities of life. They had left their homeland and found themselves in a new land that was seething with unrest.

To the recently arrived American advisers, such as those in Secretary McNamara’s “Combat Development Test Centers,” a quick-fix concept designed to correct such problems, the American perception of this conflagration was clear: This rioting and insurgency must be the work of the Communists. The Communists, they reported, had infiltrated the refugees and now were linking up with an underground fifth column of natives to create havoc and to embarrass the new Diem government in Saigon.

“Communist-led subversive insurgency” became the buzzwords, and in the United States “counterinsurgency” became the answer. The CIA’s Saigon Military Mission and its undercover terrorism and propaganda campaigns were paying off splendidly for the creators of the Cold War. All of Indochina had been prepared for war by them and their undercover activities, and the American armed forces were coming. By the time the American troops arrived, South Vietnam would be seething with an identifiable “enemy.” This had been the objective of those who’d ordered the movement of the 1,100,000 Tonkinese natives in the first place.

During this period, as in the late 1950s and the closing years of the Eisenhower administration, the general perception was that the fighting in Laos was actually much more serious than the rising problems in Vietnam. The CIA and its U.S. Armed Forces “Special Forces” allies were playing a monumental role, behind the scenes, in Laos, Burma, and Thailand. This was kept quite distinct from their activity in Vietnam.

In late 1960, when the departing President, Dwight Eisenhower, met with his successor, John F. Kennedy, he told him that the biggest trouble spot would be in Laos and that with Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon, he had little to worry about there. U.S. participation in Laos is another story, but one factor of the fighting in Laos did have a most significant impact upon the escalation of the war in South Vietnam: It began the evolution of an entirely new set of tactical characteristics of that warfare.

A full squadron of U.S. Marine Corps helicopters had been secretly transferred, at the request of the CIA, from Okinawa to Udorn, Thailand, just across the river from Laos. The helicopters that saw combat in Laos were based and maintained in Thailand by U.S. Marines. These military men did not leave Thailand; the helicopters were flown to the combat zones of Laos by CIA mercenary pilots of the CAT Airlines organization, under the operational control of the CIA.

In those days, in accordance with the provisions of National Security Council Directive #5412, every effort had been made to keep U.S. military and other covert assistance at a level that could be “plausibly” disclaimed. The theory was that if these operations were compromised in any way, the U.S. government should be able to “disclaim plausibly” its role in the action. In other words, these helicopters had been “sterilized.” There were no U.S. Marine Corps insignia on them, there were no marine serial numbers, no marine paperwork, no marine pilots. This was at best a thin veneer; but the veneer was needed to make it possible to use the marine equipment.

Back in Saigon, CIA operators wanted those helicopters transferred to Vietnam. Many of the CIA agents who had been infiltrated into South Vietnam, contrary to the provisions of the Geneva Agreements, had been moved there secretly from Laos. While in Laos they had become accustomed to the use and convenience of this large force of combat helicopters. They wanted them in Vietnam, where they proposed to use them to transport South Vietnamese army troops to fight the fast-growing numbers of “enemy” who were rioting for food and water in the rice-growing areas of the Camau Peninsula. This helicopter movement was planned to be the CIA’s first operational combat activity of the Vietnam War. It turned out to also be the first step of a decade of escalation of that war.

At that time, all American military aid to South Vietnam was strictly limited by the “one for one” replacement stipulation of the 1954 Geneva Agreements. The CIA could not move a squadron of military helicopters into South Vietnam, because there were no helicopters there to replace. So movement of those helicopters from Laos would have to be a covert operation. Any covert operation could be initiated and maintained only in accordance with a specific directive from the National Security Council and with the cooperation and direct assistance of the Department of Defense.

The CIA’s first attempt to have these helicopters moved for combat purposes came in mid-1960 and was an attempt to beat the system. Gen. Charles P. Cabell, the deputy director of central intelligence, called one of his contacts (who happened to be this author) in the Office of Special Operations (OSO), a division of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), to see if these helicopters could be moved to Vietnam quickly and quietly, on an emergency basis, because of the outbreak of rioting all over the country.

In those days, the Office of Special Operations followed the policy set forth by Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates, which closely followed the language of the law, that is, the National Security Act of 1947. The pertinent language of that act states that the CIA operates “under the direction
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of the NSC.”

At the time of General Cabell’s call, OSO had received no authorization for such a move, and the request was denied on the ground that such a move would be covert and that the NSC had not directed such an operation into Vietnam. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the letter of this law was followed carefully.

In most cases, the CIA did not possess enough assets in facilities, people, and materiel to carry out the operations it wanted to perform. Therefore, the CIA had to come to the military establishment for support of its clandestine operations. The Defense Department would not provide this support without an agreed-upon NSC directive for each operation and usually without a guarantee of financial reimbursement from the CIA for at least “out-of-pocket” costs. This kept the CIA at bay and under reasonable control during these more “normal” years.

There is an interesting anecdote from this period that reveals President Eisenhower’s personal concern with clandestine operations. Control of the CIA has never been easy. During the early part of Eisenhower’s first term, the NSC approved a directive—NSC 10/2—that governed the policy for the development and operation of clandestine activity. The NSC did not want covert operations to be the responsibility of the military. It said, quite properly, that the military’s role was a wartime, not a peacetime, one. Therefore, such operations, when directed, would be assigned to the CIA. At the same time, it had long been realized that the CIA did not have adequate resources to carry out such operations by itself and that it was better that it didn’t.

Thus, the NSC ruled that when such operations had been directed, the CIA would turn to the Defense Department, and when necessary, to other departments or agencies of the government, for support.

Sometimes the support provided was considerable. President Eisenhower was quite disturbed by this policy. He saw that it would create, within the organization of the CIA, a surrogate military organization designed to carry out military-type covert operations in peacetime. It would follow, he thought, that the CIA might, over the years, become a very large, uncontrollable military force in itself. He could not condone that, and he acted to curb such a trend.

President Eisenhower had written in the margin of the first page of the NSC 10/2 directive, on the copy that had been sent to the Defense Department: “At no time will the CIA be provided with more equipment, etc., than is absolutely necessary for the support of the operation directed and such support provided will always be limited to the requirements of that single operation.”

This stipulation by the President worked rather well as long as the Office of the Secretary of Defense enforced it strictly. Later, certain elements of the military turned this directive around and began to use the CIA as a vehicle for doing things they wanted to do—as with the Special Forces of the U.S. Army—but could not do, because of policy, during peacetime.

This situation was confronted seriously by President Kennedy immediately following the failure of the Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961.
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By the early 1950s, former President Harry S. Truman was saying that when he signed the CIA legislation into law, he made the biggest mistake of his presidency. In those same years, President Eisenhower had similar thoughts, and he did everything he could to place reasonable controls on the agency. Both of these men feared the CIA because of its power to operate in secrecy and without proper accountability.