The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (19 page)

It became clear that the United States had underestimated the enormous ambitions of the Lao Dong, the North Vietnamese Communist Party, which saw the Geneva Accords as nothing more than a tactical ploy. A measure of the agreement’s failure can be taken by the enthusiasm with which it was received by the North Vietnamese, who hailed the Accords as a ‘success’ and a ‘victory.’
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Far from reducing the number of troops in Laos, the North Vietnamese continued to build up and strengthen their forces while enlarging the Ho Chi Minh Trail - activities they pursued in secret.

In the southern panhandle of Laos two divisions of their crack regular troops manned the Trail, guarding and improving its skein of paths and roads, while countless thousands of soldiers and tons of supplies flowed to bolster the burgeoning war in South Vietnam. In the north of Laos the Vietnamese fielded their regular troops on a rotational basis, according to the season, as well as providing permanent cadre for the Pathet Lao army. Despite repeated complaints and accusations by Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, the North Vietnamese simply denied everything: they had no troops in Laos, or in South Vietnam, they stated repeatedly, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail did not exist.

The United States now had to find a way to counter these North Vietnamese moves without provoking confrontation with the Soviet Union or China. President Kennedy reacted to the situation by fielding a deniable, clandestine force of a paramilitary nature, mostly run by the CIA, with strict instructions that all the actual fighting should be done by indigenous troops.

This
L’Armée Clandestine
had grown rapidly to number nine thousand men by the summer of 1961. Nine CIA specialists were assigned to it, nine Green Berets and ninety-nine Thai special-service types from the CIA-trained and oddly titled Police Aerial Resupply Unit (PARU).
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The buildup of the Meo army was further intensified after the Geneva Accords when it became clear they would be needed to battle the North Vietnamese without the support of U.S. ground forces. By 1963 it was up to a strength of thirty thousand, mostly local defense units, but ten thousand were formed into Special Guerrilla Units (SGUs). Together the SGUs formed a battalion made up of three line companies and an HQ unit, armed with bazookas and mortars, and later 75mm and 105mm howitzers which moved from hilltop to hilltop by helicopters. In order to induce the CIA congressional sub-committees to approve funding to enable this army to grow further, the Agency indulged in some creative bookwork to reorganize Gen. Vang Fao’s forces. ‘The problem was, how do you indicate to Congress that you have more than a hundred teams when you actually have only one fourth that number?’ said Langley desk officer Ralph McGehee. ‘The answer was simple: the couple of dozen teams were divided, on paper only, into platoons of only a few individuals each, and instantly there were the necessary number of teams.’ Similarly, Langley put a lot of effort into picking the right name for its forces: ‘Hunter-Killer Teams’ was rejected because it made them sound like assassins, while ‘Home Defense Teams’ was considered too passive. The name finally adopted was ‘Mobile Strike Forces.’
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As no U.S. military planes were allowed to be based inside the country, the CIA’s proprietary commercial airline, Air America, played an essential role with its helicopters, transports, and specialized STOL airplanes. Paramilitary specialists seconded to the CIA were introduced into the country to help train and organize the Royal Lao Army and the Meo guerrilla units in the north of Laos. The Air Commandos set up a secret base across the Mekong in Nakhon Phanom, Thailand.

Every clandestine maneuver the United States made to match the North Vietnamese was done after consultation with Souvanna Phouma and with his permission. In turn, Souvanna demanded that his complicity in such arrangements be kept secret, lest his position in the country become untenable. However, under international law the United States was permitted to act against the North Vietnamese even without the permission of the Laotian government. The Hague Conference of 1907, which modified many of the rules of war, declared, ‘A neutral country has the obligation not to allow its territory to be used by a belligerent. If the neutral country is unwilling or unable to prevent this, the other belligerent has the right to take appropriate counteraction.’
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The mechanisms for this secret war were mostly set up under Ambassador Leonard Unger, the first U.S. ambassador appointed to the country after the agreement. Unger was also responsible for giving Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma renewed confidence in U.S. intentions in the area. Although Souvanna Phouma would later be criticized by the Communists as an American lackey, he was a genuine patriot who tirelessly sought a middle course for Laos throughout his career. He had vigorously opposed previous U.S. policy aimed at confrontation in Laos and had expressed strong anti-American sentiments in the process.

But after Geneva, the intention of the United States was to prevent Laos from becoming a primary theater of warfare, and to do only what was necessary to prevent the Vietnamese from overrunning the country. Only a small portion of the paramilitary operation was actually in Laos itself, with all support housed in Thailand under a secret agreement.

At the same time the decision had been made by 1962 to fight the Lao Dong on its own terms in South Vietnam. Once the North Vietnamese had been stopped there, it was reasoned, they would ease back into their own country, have no further use for the Trail, and make no more encroachments on Laotian territory. The framework of the 1962 agreements would then be reconstituted.

The flaw in this premise was that everything rested upon the Americans winning in South Vietnam - and winning outright, quickly. The holding operation in Laos would buy time while the North Vietnamese were sent packing. A year, maybe two, was all that it was expected to take. Nobody could foresee that this small, deniable, clandestine arrangement would mushroom into a massive military commitment, an ever-escalating policy of devastating bombing, and a ten-year secret war.

The Americans in Geneva might have misjudged North Vietnamese ambitions, but not their warlike intentions. Sullivan had accompanied Harriman to a Geneva hotel during negotiations to meet North Vietnam’s foreign minister, Ung Van Khiem - ‘a small stocky man who dressed in bulky Soviet suits with the sleeves so long they covered his chubby hands when he stood’ was Sullivan’s first impression.

It was not a successful meeting, Ung rejected every attempt at negotiation, denied any North Vietnamese complicity in the war in the south, and refused to acknowledge the thousands of troops fighting there. Sullivan’s assessment of ling’s posture was that he was ‘brutally, arrogantly negative’ and he judged the man himself an ‘insulting little thug.’

Only at the very end of the meeting did Harriman’s patience finally give way to display his contained anger. Towering over the diminutive Ung, he told him he was in for a long, tough war - a remark, of course, which cut both ways.

Negotiations were similarly rebuffed when Sullivan traveled with Prince Souvanna Phouma to the Plain of Jars to meet with the leader of the Communist Pathet Lao, who, in the Laotian Alice-in-Wonderland nature of things, happened to be the prime minister’s half brother, Prince Souphanouvong, ‘an irritable, testy little character,’ according to Sullivan. (Most Laotians firmly believed that the brothers, as members of the royal family, had magical, intermediary powers with the unseen world, a belief which enhanced both men’s influence with their followers.)

In Laos, the Pathet Lao faction ‘was nothing more than a handful of leftists who acted as a front for the Lao Dong party of North Vietnam,’ and Souphanouvong mirrored the stubborn bellicosity of his patrons. The meeting degenerated into fractious argument until Prince Souvanna Phouma stomped out of the room, leaving his half brother and Sullivan in an eye-to-eye confrontation. ‘Souphanouvong’s North Vietnamese bodyguard came in, and he had a little submachine gun which he pointed at my head and took the safety catch off. Souphanouvong let him stay in that position for five minutes while we continued our harangue before he waved him off. That was the kind of gamesmanship he played.’

These experiences left Sullivan with no illusions about Communist designs on Laos, although at the same time he was skeptical about U.S. policy concerning Vietnam. These views were strengthened to the point of cynicism when he took part in a war game in Washington, D.C., organized by the joint chiefs of staff in the spring of 1963. It was to prove uncannily prophetic.

The game was designed to explore what would happen if the United States got involved in a war in Vietnam. In the game, America became the Blue Team and North Vietnam the Red Team. Sullivan was military head of the Red Team (General Giap), drawing on the knowledge and advice of a Marine Corps general, members from all sections of the military, intelligence officers, and civilians from the relevant government organizations. The Red Team played according to the rules of guerrilla warfare, accepting heavy casualties and exploiting all the weaknesses that could be found in the traditional military doctrines of the United States and the vulnerabilities of an open, democratic country.

The game was played out deep in the ‘Strangelove’ bunker of the National Military Command Center and took a week, representing a decade in real time. By the end of 1972 in game time it was all over. The Red Team was everywhere on the map of Indochina. The North Vietnamese forces controlled the countryside in South Vietnam, had overrun Laos, and had a free run in Cambodia. Despite inflicting severe casualties on the enemy, who had withstood massive bombing and 500,000 American troops, the United States was no closer to victory. It had spent huge amounts of money on the war and borne the brunt of hostile world opinion and student rebellion, while its own Congress was on the brink of revolt.

One conclusion of the game which was bitterly resented by high-ranking officers in the Air Force was that massive bombing seemed to promise little result. Gen. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the Air Force, became emotional at a critique session at the end of the game and charged that the Rand Corporation, which had drawn up the rules and acted as referee, had been biased against the Air Force - a particularly weak argument as the Rand Corporation was founded by the Air Force, which has always been its largest client.

LeMay believed in bombing, and was convinced that the Air Force would be able to interdict Vietnamese supplies, destroy its military installations, and shatter the morale of its population. ‘My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the stone age.’
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As a result of LeMay’s objections, a second game was organized, broader in scope than the first and with five teams this time (to bring in Russia, China, and South Vietnam). The United States fared a little better, but not much. Similar reservations about the effectiveness of bombing were voiced and the conclusion was the same.

One of the Air Force’s gripes about the way the war game had been scored by the Rand Corporation was that Red Team hit-and-run tactics against installations within South Vietnam itself had been allowed to succeed. This was unrealistic scoring, the Air Force argued, and objected strongly when a war game operation by guerrillas to infiltrate and blow up a large number of U.S. aircraft at Bien Hoa airfield in a game-time date of 1964 was allowed.

Sullivan was to have cause to remember this particular argument. In November 1964 he was returning to Washington, after a stint in Vietnam, to be sworn in as ambassador to Laos. He looked out of the window of his airplane and saw black smoke billowing up from the airport below. It was Bien Hoa. A successful Vietcong guerrilla raid had destroyed fuel, ammunition, and U.S. aircraft. And this time it was not a game.

As the crisis in Laos seemingly dissolved, so the problems of Vietnam came to the fore. For the next ten years, Vietnam would dominate all of U.S. military and diplomatic activity, and the world’s attention. Laos would be mostly forgotten, relegated once more to the background by more pressing American interests and considerations. ‘The Forgotten War’ was how Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma described it. Or, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk inelegantly remarked: ‘After 1963 Laos was only the wart on the hog.’
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William H. Sullivan arrived as ambassador to Laos in late 1964. An exceptionally bright and gifted diplomat, he was, at the age of forty-two, the youngest ambassador in the U.S. Foreign Service. His long dealings with the problems of Laos made him an ideal choice, and his realistic, hardheaded, pragmatic approach to the job combined an overview of the Big Picture with a detailed working knowledge of the reality of the war.

Sullivan came from an Irish-American background and had graduated from Brown University
summa cum
laude.
Even as a student, with World War II looming before him, he believed that America’s destiny was not to dominate the world, ‘but rather to live with and cope with other people, other cultures, and other powers... alien to our values and occasionally anathema to our ideals.’
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This was certainly an enlightened view from a young man about to go to war.

He enlisted in the Navy in 1942 and saw action on destroyers in the North Sea, against German submarines in the Mediterranean, in the Normandy invasion, and in the South Pacific. On the assault against Okinawa he witnessed a macabre mass suicide of Japanese troops when rank upon rank of defeated soldiers threw themselves to their deaths over the edge of a cliff onto jagged rocks 150 feet below. The incident was an object lesson in the fanatical motivation that could be instilled in men.