To Kill the Pope (7 page)

Vietnamese villages were theoretically controlled by South Vietnamese and American forces: “theoretically” because they were controlled in daytime, becoming Viet Cong country after dark. In Stephens' opinion, this disastrous reality could be reversed only by the operation he had named Phoenix after Phung Hoang, a huge bird that, in Vietnamese lore, could fly everywhere, anytime. To him, Phoenix was a quintessential CIA undertaking, and he would not trust anyone else with it.

This was why Stephens demanded that the Agency in Langley—and, through his Washington friends, the White House itself—
expand the CIA contingent in Vietnam with as many promising young officers as possible. And this was precisely why Tim Savage had found himself in Saigon the week before Christmas.

*  *  *

The formal designation of Phoenix was Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRU), another euphemism intended to make the Pacification Program appear constructive and benign. But, as much as anything else, Phoenix teams—usually ten men—were assassination squads, pure and simple. Tim realized it as he listened to Stephens explain Phoenix in the course of a briefing in a spacious, air-conditioned CORDS conference room for CIA officers newly attached to the operation.

“What we have to do is smash the Viet Cong infrastructure, no more and no less,” Stephens had said in his oddly sqeaky voice, addressing his audience from a podium in front of a huge map of Vietnam divided into military and CORDS regions, provinces, districts, and grids that showed the areas of Phoenix activities.

A short, balding, bamboo-thin man with sharp features, Stephens was more at ease when he was looking down on the officers. He was very high strung, and eye contact made him nervous. He avoided it whenever he could, sometimes brusquely removing his rimless glasses as if to spare his pale blue eyes the experience of facing another human being.

“And it isn't really all that complicated,” Stephens had gone on. “We locate the cadres, interrogate them about their networks, neutralize them, and before long we finally break Charlie's backbone. It should have been done this way years ago, instead of wasting time and resources on those Strategic Hamlets and the vast search-and-destroy Army missions and misleading body counts.”

Stephens had stressed that his overall pacification concept included “resettlement villages” where peasant families, not suspected of enemy contacts, were transferred after their homes in clearly identified Viet Cong territory had been burned down by Phoenix teams or regular American or South Vietnamese army units to “eliminate centers of infection and contagion and teach them a lesson,” as he put it. Stephens recognized that
all
peasant families were not Viet Cong operatives. He had paused, then added:

“Among your responsibilities, gentlemen, is to identify enemy villages and erase them, if necessary, after you have dealt with the cadres and the leaders—preferably terminating them. And I don't have to remind you that everything related to Phoenix is graveyard. Never a word to anyone outside the operation. We don't need a My Lai kind of publicity in our line of work . . .”

What Stephens had told them that day made sense to Tim Savage. Son of a wartime hero, a practicing Catholic from childhood and a dedicated CIA officer, Tim believed in the righteousness of the anticommunist struggle in Vietnam and the American engagement on the side of Saigon. After all, it was JFK, the man he so greatly admired, who had first decided to involve the United States in Indochina. In Tim's mind, it fitted into the idealism of his generation.

Tim understood, of course, that people died in wars and that supreme cruelty was part of war. He belonged to a political and religious culture that accepted these realities, morally and ethically, if a war was a “just cause” and thereby a “just war” in the ancient Christian sense. And there was no question in his mind at that point that this certainly was the case in Vietnam. America was in the middle of the Cold War, communist expansion had to be checked at all costs, and the long-suffering Vietnamese given a chance at freedom, independence, and democracy. This was the American tradition and the American way. And Tim agreed with Stephens that the Viet Cong infrastructure had to be eradicated if the insurgency were to be stamped out. There was no other way and, Tim thought, Phoenix was the natural instrument. He had no qualms about the mission. Notions like “neutralizing” Viet Cong cadres were abstractions in his mind as he listened to Stephens that first morning on his new job.

*  *  *

Consequently when he was given his Phoenix marching orders, Tim did not see himself as a prospective assassin. The word did not even enter his consciousness. He was not senior enough in the CIA to be familiar with the Agency's own secret culture of political assassinations that went back to the Fifties, right after its creation under President Truman's National Security Act. Perhaps astonishingly, the CIA's founding fathers—the cultivated, wealthy,
God-fearing men from the Eastern seaboard elite—had no moral qualms about such assassinations as a weapon in furthering what they perceived as the goals and interests of the foreign policy of the United States. To them, it was not even a question of “just causes,” but of pure pragmatism and effectiveness. Planning and ordering political murders fitted smoothly into the romantic knighthood aura surrounding CIA covert operations. Covert operators saw themselves as a noble and heroic brotherhood, their excitement often heightened by the extreme secrecy surrounding the tasks of “terminations with extreme prejudice.”

As Tim Savage would learn in time, this mindset had been reflected in the CIA's role in Guatemala in 1954 in overthrowing the elected president, a leftist named Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, who had instituted land reform policies and was believed to be developing close ties with communism and Moscow. As it happened, the United Fruit Company, powerful in Central America and splendidly connected in Washington, was the principal target of land reform nationalizations. Rapidly, the CIA put together a Guatemalan paramilitary force to oust Arbenz while its Technical Services Division developed detailed assassination guidelines. They were embodied in an assassination training manual that stressed that “the specific technique employed will depend upon a large number of variables, but should be constant in one point: death must be absolutely certain.” The instructions added helpfully that “absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region.” In the end, no assassinations were required in Guatemala—Arbenz collapsed quickly—but the CIA remained faithful to this policy-making option. Tim Savage came upon a copy of the training manual in the small library at CORDS Saigon headquarters, but lacking the background of CIA operations, he was not particularly impressed or disturbed by it.

He did not realize, for example, that in the early Sixties, the CIA had virtually taken over all the decision making in the Congo, which had just been granted its independence by Belgium, with Patrice Lumumba, a young leftist who had attended Moscow's “Friendship University,” becoming its first leader. Washington therefore feared communist influence in the Congo—in addition to the fact that the huge African country was exceedingly
rich in uranium, the nuclear bomb raw material, plus cobalt, copper, gold, and diamonds. Lumumba immediately appeared on the CIA assassination list and was soon terminated by an unknown shooter.

Still in the Sixties, Fidel Castro, too, made that list. In the case of Cuba, American national security—“Ninety Miles from Home”—as well as the interests of great American corporations whose properties were being nationalized by the victorious revolutionaries, and those of organized crime syndicates owning Havana casinos, happened to converge. This brought the CIA's Technical Services Division and Mafia murder specialists together in shaping surrealistic scenarios for doing away with Castro. They all failed.

Not surprisingly, asassination as a political and counterinsurgency tool was adopted by the CIA in Vietnam and refined by Roger Stephens. By the time Tim Savage reached Vietnam, Stephens' Phoenix had been operating for years. He fully grasped its significance when he took up his assignment in the Mekong Delta.

T
IM
S
AVAGE'S ASSIGNMENT
was Can Tho, the capital of Phong Dinh Province in the southern Delta, which served as the headquarters of the Pacification Program for all of the Mekong Delta, well south of Saigon. The Delta formed part of IV Corps—South Vietnam having been divided into four military Corps regions—and Can Tho was the home of CORDS IV, which, among other responsibilities, coordinated Phoenix operations in that section of the country. The command of the South Vietnamese Army's IV Corps forces was also located in Can Tho along with the command of its Twenty-first Infantry Division, probably one of the most useless in the whole war.

A Blackhawk gunship helicopter had transported Tim from Newport heliport on Saigon River in downtown Saigon to Can Tho on a misty morning early in January of 1970. He traveled in the company of two other junior CIA officers seconded to Phoenix and Jake Kurtski, the IV Corps CORDS chief, who was returning to his base after several days of intensive “Pentagon East” consultations with Stephens and senior American military commanders. Kurtski was Tim's immediate boss.

Kurtski was a completely bald, short, solidly built man with a thick neck, a perpetually red face, and strangely green slits of eyes—he was always chomping on a dead cigar. Born in Poland, he had come to the United States at the age of twenty-three in 1947, from a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. His sponsor was a colonel in Army Intelligence who had been impressed by the young man's toughness and talent for manipulation, and had him attached to his personal staff as a local hire. During the war, Kurtski had belonged to the anti-German armed underground in Poland—the Home Army—but had fled west ahead of the advancing
Soviets. He hated the Godless communists. In America, Kurtski had spent a year or so working as a civilian with an Intelligence unit at Fort Benning, Georgia, before being co-opted by the infant CIA.

The Agency was eager for truly tough officers, especially if they had wartime experience and spoke foreign languages; Kurtski was an ideal candidate, fluent in Polish, Russian, German, and French. DP camps were superb do-it-yourself language schools, what with fellow refugees of a dozen nationalities. At the CIA, Kurtski soon discovered that his superiors were quite partial to Europeans, particularly Eastern Europeans and Germans, and prospered rapidly in his new environment. His underground know-how was another plus. Assigned to the “black” Directorate of Plans, Kurtski was sent back to Europe to help deploy CIA networks across the continent, working out of stations in Vienna, Bonn, Berlin, and Helsinki.

When President Kennedy resolved to involve the United States in Vietnam, Kurtski was among the first senior CIA case officers to be sent to Saigon. He was not familiar with Southeast Asia, but his bosses—notably Station Chief Roger Stephens—found him to be an adaptable quick study. Kurtski's only request was to be allowed to remain indefinitely in Vietnam: in his mind, it was the greatest challenge of his career, a real war instead of the indecisive Cold War. He was determined to help make America victorious there—in gratitude to his adopted country.

Kurtski rapidly learned enough Vietnamese to deal with native friend or foe and mastered guerrilla war concepts faster than his American chiefs, who still were trying to comprehend what national insurgencies were all about. When the time came, Kurtski was on hand to help Stephens give birth to Operation Phoenix. He was a bachelor, a loner, had no friends other than Stephens, and was genuinely disliked and feared by his CIA colleagues, which suited him just fine. He went on solitary drinking binges—bourbon—once a week. He had a violent temperament. He had killed people without hesitation or remorse.

At Newport heliport, Kurtski barked at Tim, the first time he had addressed him, with a Polish-accented sentence: “You better get your act together right away or Charlie will have your
focking
head.” He repeated it for the benefit of the two other case officers.
Kurtski carried a .45-caliber Colt pistol under his flowing Hawaiian sports shirt, the CIA's sartorial trademark hot weather civilian attire. Most CIA officers in the field despised Army fatigues, and the Vietnamese working with or near Americans could usually spot the “spooks” by their taste in dress. Tim, who had brought colorful sports shirts from Cairo, this morning wore his best flowered product of Egyptian bottom-of-the-line designers to be in tune with the Agency's idea of a uniform. He had been issued a sidearm, but the Blackhawk's crew chief handed him an M-16 automatic rifle as Tim climbed aboard the chopper.

“You never know,” the boyish-looking crew chief remarked casually. “The bastards like to take potshots at us. Or we could crash . . .”

Presently, the rotors came alive, the helicopter shuddered on the pad, bolted forward like a thoroughbred out of the gate, and the crew chief installed himself comfortably behind a swiveling heavy machine gun at one of the open sliding side doors.

*  *  *

Leaving Newport behind, the Blackhawk climbed to three thousand feet through the morning haze, the pilots setting it on a southwestern heading. The crew chief explained to his passengers over the intercom that helicopter pilots preferred to fly above the range of light arms' fire from the ground.

“Why, just the other day a pilot lost his balls when a bullet hit the chopper's undercarriage, penetrated the craft and hit the guy in the scrotum,” the chief shouted into his mike, sounding vaguely amused. Tim gently fingered through the fabric of his sports shirt the silver St. Christopher medallion on a thin chain around his neck. The relic, personally blessed by Pope Pius XII, had been given to him by his mother on her return from a group audience at the Vatican shortly after the war. She assured Tim that St. Christopher would keep him safe no matter where he went.