The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (22 page)

‘Heinie’ Aderholt, the Air Commando commander at Nakhon Phanom, had brought Secord into the war to run a number of clandestine operations - including secret C-130 missions into Laos using unmarked Air Force planes at night, and at least one unconventional attack on the enemy which involved dropping a planeload of Calgonite dishwasher detergent on the Ho Chi Minh Trail to make it too slippery for the Communists to travel. Secord did not personally endear himself to his commander, but good work earned his respect.

‘I thought he was arrogant,’ Aderholt said. ‘He acted like a general when he was a captain. But he was the best goddam officer I ever had. The smartest man in the whole show.’

The most famous of the CIA’s Laotian warlords is Anthony Posepny - the legendary Tony Poe, also known as Bill Gibbs, Upin, and an assortment of operational aliases. Poe is an ex-Marine - said to have been at Iwo Jima in World War II - with a history of leading CIA secret armies all over the Far East; in 1956 he helped train Tibetan Khamba tribesmen and engineered the escape of the Dalai Lama; in 1958 he was one of two paramilitary agents sent in to help avert the defeat of a rebel uprising against Sukarno in Indonesia; in 1960 he trained Nationalist Chinese paramilitary units bound for mainland China.

Poe likes to describe himself as a ‘Bohemian Scot,’ and is one of those red-blooded American crusaders who have spent very little time at home in their beloved United States. As a Marine recruit Poe looked like a young Marlon Brando (and in late middle age has grown to resemble the mad figure of Colonel Kurtz, whom Brando plays in
Apocalypse
Now
- except instead of slothful, maudlin introspection, Poe exhibits furious activity coupled with absolute certainty). Stories of his courage are legion - he once carried a wounded soldier a dozen miles on his back, even though he was wounded himself. He has been badly wounded half a dozen times, and one hand is a claw, maimed when a jungle booby trap went off, killing a friend. War is never far away from Tony Poe, and even when traveling in peaceful places he always carries a boxer’s mouthpiece in case of bar fights.

People who knew and fought with him said that in their opinion perpetual jungle warfare had turned him into a heavy drinker and brutalized him. Somewhere along the way, CIA colleagues say, Tony Poe went ‘bamboo.’ One explained; ‘You can’t put a man in the jungle to fight an endless war where he has to live with natives in a primitive environment, and the only entertainment is to drink a couple of bottles of Scotch a day, and not expect him to go a little mad.’

In Laos, Tony Poe began life as Vang Pao’s case officer, but seems to have fallen out with the general by 1965, when he complained that there were too many ‘round eyes’ (Americans) at Long Tieng - and also that the general was corrupt. It was always a moot point whether Vang Pao was run by the CIA or vice versa, and it is probable that the general resented Poe’s strong, domineering personality.

(In a later run-in with Long Tieng base chief Tom Clines, Vang Pao ruthlessly demonstrated who was in charge. Six prisoners had been brought in by the Meo, and Clines demanded that his men interrogate them. Vang Pao nodded to an aide, who immediately had the men taken outside and shot. The CIA man took the point. ‘What I meant to say, general, is that I would
appreciate
it if you would
allow
us to interrogate prisoners,
please
.’)

Poe moved to northwest Laos, where he ran all western operations, including cross-border forays into Burma and China. Northwest Laos is populated by a diverse mixture of tribal minorities, and Poe learned to speak several dialects and married a Yau princess. The war was complicated locally because of the annual cross-border opium caravans of the Burmese Shans, and the relentless construction of a road by the Communist Chinese (allowed by an agreement with the Laotian government before the Geneva Accords). The road, which would eventually stretch 250 miles from Dien Bien Phu to the Mekong, was, in effect, an extension of the Chinese border, cutting off fifteen thousand square miles of northern Laos. It was protected by anti-aircraft guns and thousands of Chinese troops, and was ordered off limits to all U.S. personnel to avoid provoking the Chinese. Tony Poe was kept on a very short lead and given almost no support by the embassy. His reports of North Vietnamese troops coming into the country from across the Chinese border and using the new road were pointedly ignored. Unofficially, Poe was given support by the Air Commandos, who used Thai pilots flying T-28s to attack the road and North Vietnamese troops, while Poe talked Air America pilots into loading their planes with large rocks with which to bomb the enemy, and dropping primed hand grenades in mayonnaise jars onto them (a dangerous technique which involved pulling the pin of a grenade, and then placing it in a jar to keep the lever down -when the jar broke the grenade exploded).

He offered his native troops a one-dollar bonus for a set of Communist ears, and they deposited their ghastly trophies in a plastic bag specially kept for the purpose. ‘They used to hang on strings on the porch of Tony’s house like chitlings,’ said Charlie Jones, an Air Commando Butterfly FAC - the precursors of the Ravens. Irritated by the embassy’s open skepticism over his claims of a large enemy body count (U.S. officials in Vientiane questioned the very existence of North Vietnamese regulars in Foe’s section of Laos), he stapled a bloody batch of freshly sliced ears to his next report.

But Poe finally canceled the scheme when he landed on a remote strip and saw a small boy without any ears. ‘What happened to your ears?’ Poe growled.

‘My father took them to get money from the Americans,’ the boy replied matter-of-factly.
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He was also rumored to preserve the heads of particular enemies in jars of formaldehyde, dropping one into the village of a hostile village chief who had shot at his plane. ‘If you do everything according to the orders, you’d be in a straitjacket. You have to break the monotony sometimes.’
[99]

In 1968 Poe sustained a stomach wound when leading a group of his men into battle, in contravention of the most stringent embassy orders that CIA case officers were not allowed to take part in combat. He was immediately thrown out of the country by Ambassador Sullivan - but seems to have been protected by Pat Landry, for he resurfaced in Thailand, where he ran a Special Forces training camp. The Thai commandos he trained adored him. ‘Mr. Poe was very nice and polite,’ one said, ‘and a
very
good dancer.’
[100]

In the interregnum between Sullivan’s departure from Laos and Godley’s arrival, Tony Poe slipped back into the country, where he continued to work until at least the early 1970s. His notoriety is an embarrassment to many Americans who worked in Laos. (‘You ought not to quote him so much,’ Ambassador Godley said, referring to the author’s previous book,
Air America
. ‘Tony was an exception.’)

Exception or not, Tony Poe fought in the secret war in Laos for a decade. One of the Ravens was with Poe when he returned to the United States for a CIA retirement presentation ceremony. ‘They sort of said, “You did a wonderful job, now go back to Thailand and never bother us again,” ‘ Karl Polifka said. ‘I drove him out to the National Airport afterward, accompanied by some Agency people who seemed to want to make sure he got on the plane, and it was as if they couldn’t get him out of D.C. fast enough.’

The majority of the paramilitary types in Laos displayed none of Poe’s gaudier excesses, although many of them proved to be equally gifted as leaders of native troops. There is no doubt that most of them were exceptionally brave and committed men - contrary to popular opinion, CIA paramilitary case officers are not cold-blooded and cynical killers, but often moral and idealistic. Many developed a passionate attachment to the Meo and their cause, and they suffered agonies of guilt and self-recrimination when U.S. policy dictated that the CIA move on and abandon them.

There was clearly an enormous disparity between the college-educated CIA analysts in the embassy and the paramilitary types, who were often the equivalent of a Special Forces sergeant. There seemed to be no provision made to bridge the gap. It was as if an army were forced to go into battle with only staff officers and sergeants, without a body of competent officers of all ranks between them. In Laos it was all sergeants and generals.

One exception was a CIA colonel with a military background, who had commanded a parachute division in World War II, advised the division commander in the war against the Greek Communists, and been a senior adviser to a corps-sized division against guerrillas in Korea (and was later chief of the CIA overflight program). The colonel saw the scope of the problem when he first arrived in Laos and inspected machine-gun pits set up by a CIA case officer in a Thai position. ‘They were just pointing out into space,’ the colonel said. ‘I told him he had to get angles of fire - very basic stuff. That he didn’t want his machine gunners to see what’s coming at them because they’ll get frightened and fire in one direction instead of putting out bands of fire. He was a good sergeant but just didn’t know his stuff.

‘People were used beyond their capacity in Laos. One, who could have handled anything up through a company grade, was put in as senior adviser to a corps-sized group of twenty thousand men.’ When the colonel made the criticism at a meeting at the embassy he was embarrassed to find people looking at him as if he were a West Point snob. In the field the sergeants ran the show.

Policy tended to be improvised. ‘I think it was day-to-day,’ a senior CIA man said. ‘Policy was something we discovered as we went along and it became policy. We were just trying to protect what we had to allow the government to continue.’

But one policy pursued relentlessly by the CIA was secrecy. In Laos it had become a way of life. The press were naturally considered a danger, but so was any outsider - even from the military. John Clark Pratt, an Air Force historian, arrived in Udorn with the necessary security clearances to allow him to go up to Long Tieng and interview Gen. Vang Pao for a classified Air Force study he was working on. The CIA at Udorn demanded an additional handwriting test - ‘to make sure you are who you say you are’ - which involved sending a sample by mail to Washington.

After a considerable delay, which gave ample time for the Udorn spooks to warn their counterparts in the Secret City of the impending arrival of an Air Force snoop, Pratt was allowed to go up to Long Tieng. He was met from the plane by a CIA man, who told him he needed a fingerprint check. While this was being verified, Pratt was incarcerated incommunicado in one of the back rooms of the CIA hootch. He assumed it to be the library: four bookshelves were packed with rows of dog-eared paperbacks, all of which fitted into the spy, action-adventure, shoot-em-up genre - James Bond, John Le Carre, John McDonald, Louis Lamour, etc. (Life did not so much imitate art, in the world of the spooks, as pulp fiction.) After four hours the CIA man returned to say that verification had come through, but unfortunately Gen. Vang Pao was no longer on the base. Pratt returned to Udorn empty-handed.

Tom Shera, a Raven who returned to Laos to work in the air attaché’s office, explained, ‘The CAS guys didn’t even want the other agencies to know what was going on. In 1970 the general officers on the Air Staff of the USAF had no idea that there were that many Air Force people in Laos. And when they found out, the vice chief of the Air Force personally came over to get a briefing, because nobody at the Pentagon knew what was going on.’ (The Air Force tried to exact its revenge on the CIA by encouraging the Ravens to give them intelligence first, ‘so we can be one up on the spooks at the Country Team meetings.’)

The difference between the U.S. approaches to the wars in Vietnam and in Laos can best be understood by taking a close look at the personalities and careers of the individuals who ran the CIA in the country. Ted Shackley - previously the boss of the CIA’s Miami station set up by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs - took over as station chief from Blaufarb in July 1966 and remained until August 1968. An ambitious technocrat, Shackley was known inside the Agency as a ruthless, hard-driving, no-nonsense boss with a penchant for filling key jobs with personal friends. Tall, thin, and exceptionally pale, he was the type of man some of the case officers who worked under him found ‘weird.’ He was considered ‘cold’ by colleagues, a man who kept people at arm’s length, but who was also fair. There were those who judged him ‘brilliant’ - although others felt his computerlike rhetoric and convoluted reasoning seemed more profound than it was.

Shackley was a hard-line anti-communist who could be shrill to the point of fanaticism in his dire warnings: ‘Make no mistake. We - all of us -
are
locked in a struggle for survival,’ he wrote in his book
The Third Option
, in which he argues the case for covert operations as a necessary choice of weapon from a limited arsenal. ‘At one end there is the give-and-take through the normal channels of negotiation and diplomacy; at the other lies the unthinkable: war. But there is yet one more. Experts in revolutionary warfare and paramilitary operations call it the third option.’
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This is a standard argument often heard from the CIA’s clandestine operatives - that the Agency offers a tool of middle resort, somewhere between diplomatic protest and military intervention. But in Laos the definitions of ‘covert operation’ and ‘war’ differed by no more than semantic nuance.