The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (23 page)

Laos was the place where Shackley could put his counter-insurgency theories into practice. He understood that the Meo ‘were quick to recognize that one does not eat rhetoric and propaganda.’
[102]
The CIA’s nation-building formula established pig-breeding centers, fish farms, kilns to make bricks, schools and vocational training, and co-operative retail stores that were particularly successful. U.S. AID was funding around two hundred hospitals, serving more than 150,000 patients a month, and was also training hundreds of new medics each year.

But there was another side to Shackley’s theory. When he went on from Laos to become station chief in Saigon - a very important job at the time - he had something of a mixed reputation. A group of Special Forces officers asked their CIA liaison officer what they should do with a Vietnamese double agent and were told to kill him. After all, the CIA officer said, the CIA’s station chief in Saigon, Ted Shackley, ‘had been responsible for 250 political killings in Laos and one more wouldn’t make any difference.’
[103]

In Saigon Shackley encouraged personnel to ‘recruit, recruit, recruit - that is bribe, inveigle, and hire anyone and everyone to work for us as agents,’ CIA analyst Frank Snepp said. The station’s spy roster swelled accordingly and was soon sending five hundred reports a month back to Washington.
[104]

Shackley took over Western Hemisphere Division in 1972, the CIA’s Clandestine Services’ Latin American arm. His first act was to cancel most of the division’s operations and fire those agents he feared Philip Agee might have either named to Cuban and Soviet intelligence agents in 1971, or who might be named in Agee’s upcoming expose on the CIA (
Inside the Company
). But when the book appeared few of those fired were mentioned.
[105]

Shackley later returned to the Far East as head of the CIA’s East Asia Division, where he reaped the dubious harvest of his earlier recruitment drive. In 1974, as the Agency scrambled to clarify Hanoi’s cease-fire strategy, it was reported that over a hundred of Shackley’s Vietcong ‘agents’ were no more than enterprising fabricators, ‘intelligence’ entrepreneurs making money from selling unreliable information cobbled together from newspaper clippings and gossip.
[106]

(The clandestine world is a strange and, in the end, small place. After a premature retirement in the mid-seventies, Shackley has reportedly resurfaced in West Berlin, named as the go-between for the Iranian arms dealer, Ghorbanifar, and the White House, in the Iran-Contra scandal. Other secret war people have also been named, notably Richard Secord and Tom Clines, Long Tieng base chief. Together the three men had formed a highly publicized Unholy Trinity.

By 1981 Secord had risen in the Pentagon to become the deputy assistant secretary of defense, a job which involved formulating U.S. defense policy concerning almost forty countries; Shackley was considered by many to be a possible future director of the CIA; Clines, who had practically grown up in the CIA, where he started life in the mail room in 1949, had left the Agency to set up a private company to sell arms to Egypt following the Camp David accords.

Secord returned to Washington in 1978, after a stint in Iran advising the Shah on the best way to spend the billions of dollars he had budgeted for his Air Force. Together with Shackley and Clines he often spent the weekends at the palatial country estate of Ed Wilson, an ex-CIA agent to whom Clines had once acted as case officer, now turned international arms dealer. The men had all known each other since the war in Laos - where, on one occasion, Wilson had delivered a load of electronic beepers to Shackley, which were eventually placed in Pathet Lao units by infiltrating Meo enabling the CIA to monitor Pathet Lao movements and call in air strikes on them.

But Wilson was an agent who had got out of control and had, in effect, turned terrorist. One of his money-making enterprises involved funneling arms to Libya’s terrorist dictator, Col. Muammar el-Quaddafi. Wilson fled after an investigation into his activities, and is now serving a 52-year prison sentence for illegally selling arms to Libya. During his trial he claimed that both Secord and Shackley were silent partners in a company that was accused in 1982 of bilking the federal government of $8 million. The men denied the charge, but Secord was suspended from duty while he came under investigation by a federal grand jury for conspiring with Wilson to defraud the government. Similarly, Shackley was effectively forced into early retirement because of his relationship with Wilson. Although not indicted, and reinstated in his job, Secord left the Air Force in 1983 and went into partnership with Albert Hakim, who he met during his time in Iran, to become the president of Stanford Technology Corporation - a company which Wilson had once represented as a salesman.

Then in October 1986 Eugene Hasenfus, a one-time cargo kicker with Air America in Laos, was shot down on a clandestine supply mission to the Contras in Nicaragua. Telephone records of calls from the safe house occupied by the crew in El Salvador revealed that frequent calls were made to Secord’s home and office at Stanford Technology - which was linked in turn to Lt. Col. Oliver North’s private-aid network. And so the secret warriors of the Laotian War became linked to Iranscam, where money from arms deals made with the Ayatollah were funneled to the Contras in Nicaragua.)
[107]

Lawrence Devlin took over as CIA station chief in Vientiane in August 1968 and held the position until December 1970. He was seen by his colleagues as sincere, pleasant, and relatively easygoing after his predecessor. ‘Larry was an idealist,’ one CIA man said. ‘Pretty much the knight on the white charger.’

Idealism apart, Devlin also has a murky covert past. He had previously served with Ambassador Godley as station chief in the Congo during a period of intense CIA activity. John Stockwell, a former CIA man, described Devlin as the famous eminence grise of the Congo program, where he shuffled new governments like cards. One colleague said Devlin was ‘one of the CIA’s historic great “operators” ‘ who had ‘dealt with younger case officers and agents like an Irish-American politician, giving out patronage and coming down hard on any who stood in his way.’
[108]

The trouble in the Congo arose when Nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba received direct aid from the Soviets in his newly independent country, which had immediately sunk into chaos and bloodshed. Allen Dulles, then head of the CIA, saw Lumumba as ‘a Castro - or worse.’ The United States favored Joseph-Desire’ Mobutu, who seized power in a coup. Lumumba sought refuge with the United Nations force in the country, which put him under protective custody.

It was reported that ‘easygoing’ Devlin received a cable from Dulles himself which said that ‘High quarters ... sought Lumumba’s removal an urgent and prime objective.’ Used to reading between the lines, the station chief interpreted the cable as a strong indication that the president of the United States wanted Lumumba killed. ‘We wish to give you every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility of resuming governmental position.’ An ‘Eyes Only’ channel was set up between CIA HQ and Leopoldville, and the sum of $100,000 was authorized for the assassination.

A CIA ‘science adviser’ personally delivered two assassination kits to Devlin in Leopoldville. They consisted of rubber gloves, gauze masks, hypodermic needles, and a lethal biological agent. This was potent stuff. A cocktail concocted by the Army’s biological warfare corps, it was designed to cause in its victim tularemia (rabbit fever), brucellosis (undulant fever), tuberculosis, anthrax, smallpox, and - just to make sure - Venezuelan equine encephalitis (sleeping sickness).
[109]

The CIA hired two professional killers to carry out the planned assassination, neither of whom was American or knew of the other’s existence, and each was given a kit. Devlin requested a case officer to supervise the assassination, which included a plan to put the biological agent on Lumumba’s toothbrush.
[110]
Despite the elaborate planning, the poison was never administered, but Lumumba was beaten to death on January 17, 1961, by henchmen of Congolese politicians - who had close relationships with the CIA.
[111]

Devlin was later called back to Washington to testify before the Church Committee, which concluded that although the CIA personnel had wanted to assassinate Lumumba, they had been beaten to it by others. Not everyone is convinced of the CIA’s innocence, and Devlin is suspected of knowing more about it than his testimony revealed. One CIA man, for instance, told a colleague that he had driven all over Lubumbashi after curfew with Patrice Lumumba’s body in the trunk ‘wondering what to do with it.’
[112]
News of the death prompted the CIA base chief in Elisabethville to cable HQ: ‘Thanks for Patrice. If we had known he was coming, we would have baked a snake.’
[113]

Devlin became chief of Africa Division after his stint in Laos, and on his retirement in 1974 he accepted a four-year contract with a New York financier, based on his intimate friendship with Mobutu, who succeeded in becoming one of the world’s richest men on the backs of an impoverished population.

Devlin’s successor in Laos was Hugh Tovar, who served from October 1970 through 1972. He was sophisticated and intellectually oriented, an upright man and a good Catholic. ‘I have nothing but admiration for Hugh,’ a CIA colleague who worked with him said. ‘You could not ask for a better boss or a more considerate person.’

It was Tovar who launched an all-out campaign against drug smuggling in Laos - with limited success. But despite his reputation as an intellectual, Tovar also had a swash-buckling clandestine background. He had dropped into Indo-china by parachute as a young OSS lieutenant in World War II with the group ordered to make contact with Ho Chi Minh. Later he served as station chief during the ill-fated uprising against Sukarno in Indonesia.

Such were the men who ran the CIA’s war in Laos, a very different breed from the generals who ran the war in Vietnam. Intelligence gathered in Laos by the CIA throughout the conflict was good - both from the native agents among the enemy and from electronic intercept programs (the back-bone of which was the highly classified EC-47 - Electronic Goon - consisting of the most sophisticated electronic equipment built into a compact unit and housed in the back of the ubiquitous C-47, the antiquated work horse of Air America). The military planning of the CIA was less impressive - little more than a series of reactions to enemy initiatives. And, as the roster of CIA chiefs demonstrates, the plans were made by covert ‘operators’ rather than by soldiers.

But the oft-expressed fear of the time, that the CIA had slipped its moorings in Laos and that the war there would become a precedent for its future actions, must be judged unfounded in retrospect. The CIA was put into Laos by presidential directive, pursued the war according to the dictates of ambassadors, and duly withdrew when ordered to do so.

The seesaw pattern of the war in northern Laos continued year after year until, in the dry season of 1968-69, the North Vietnamese changed their tactics. For the first time their advance was characterized by a scorched-earth policy. Meo villages were razed to the ground as Communist soldiers passed through, denying the Americans their most valuable intelligence asset - the villagers themselves. The North Vietnamese calculated correctly that this time when they fell back in the rainy season they would be less vulnerable to ambush. The Americans responded with increased bombing.

The arrival of tens of thousands of refugees on the outskirts of Vientiane alerted the world’s press to the real scope of the war in Laos. From now on the secrecy would boomerang on the Americans. The reports led to congressional critics accusing the U.S. military of indiscriminate saturation bombing. The Nixon administration responded that the refugees were fleeing the North Vietnamese and the strictures of life under the Communist Pathet Lao - rice and porterage taxes, forced labor, and so on. The Americans pointed out that the refugees fled into the arms of the Royal Lao Government, where they were cared for by U.S. AID, and not into Communist-controlled terrain, something Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley - who replaced Sullivan - described as ‘voting with their feet.’ Press reports cited the impossibility of normal life under the rain of American bombs, and many of those opposed to the U.S. presence claimed that the bombing was the principal cause of the flood of refugees.
[114]
There were, of course, tens of thousands of Meo refugees as a result of the war
before
widespread American bombing.
[115]
The issue has never been satisfactorily settled in favor of either argument. One thing is clear: the combination of the two - harsher Communist military tactics and increased U.S. bombing - created a sea of refugees. And what these people were fleeing was the war.

Such was the Big Picture. It was something that eluded the Ravens as they flew into battle, a higher politics they were scarcely aware of and did not need to know. But unlike the war in Vietnam, which so many had come to see as a dubious military proposition, there was something simple and straightforward in Laos to fight for: the Ravens were there to help the Meo resist a traditional enemy who had invaded their country and threatened their survival. It was possible in Laos for the Ravens to believe they were the good guys, which was important if they were to sustain the will to combat through the worst moments of a nasty little war.