Deadly Deceits (14 page)

Rob Carson was the chief observer for this project. I was not a part of it and continued my intelligence-gathering duties. But I was asked to accompany a counterinsurgency team on a walk up to the villages. It occurred to me at the time that we were sacrificing intelligence-collection efforts to the demands of policy. This was my first indication that, to the CIA, policy might be more important than intelligence.

I prepared for the trip by outfitting myself with boots, fatigues, and a backpack. I decided to test the equipment by walking up the nearby Doi Su Thep mountain with Scott. As we trudged up its many miles, including the 100-plus steps up
to the temple at the top, my feet felt increasingly uncomfortable, but I doggedly walked on. When we arrived home, my feet were a bloody mess. With the coming trip to the mountains only a couple of weeks away, I steeled myself to taking that long hike in rubber thongs since my feet were just too blistered for shoes of any kind.

On the appointed day I flew to a small Thai village on the Lao border, where I joined a 10-man team of the counter-insurgency group, accompanied by a pony train. Most of the Thais loaded their backpacks on the ponies, but I, macho man, indicated I would carry my pack myself.

Up the mountain we went, I in my shower thongs with the 50-pound pack. It was at the peak of the monsoon season, and we came to a stream that was rushing wildly, swollen from the downpours. We strung a rope across the stream, and all helped to get the ponies and equipment across. I then tried to cross, holding on to the rope. The chest-high roaring water hit the heavy pack and swept me under. As I was tumbling over and over, I instinctively reached out and grabbed a low-lying tree branch and pulled myself over to the opposite shore. I had had enough of my burden, and as soon as I had wrung out my soaked clothes and taken a reserve pair of thongs from my pack, I loaded it on one of the ponies.

We climbed up and up. It seemed we would never reach our destination. Crossing another shallow, slow-running stream, my feet were attacked by leeches. Never having encountered them before, I quickly grabbed them and pulled them off. I should not have done that. The normal procedure is to put a lit cigarette to their backs, and they will release and fall off. When I grabbed them, they simply clung tighter and bit me, injecting a serum that decoagulated my blood. As I pulled them off, I ripped small holes in my skin which proceeded to bleed for hours. They bled so much that my rubber thongs became slippery, making it impossible to keep them on, so I walked the rest of the way barefooted.

We continued to struggle upward through heavy jungle, passing various types of wildlife, including a large translucent snake with bright red eyes which stared at us from a ledge within striking distance of the trail. By late afternoon I assumed we were approaching the village. We stopped, and the team leader said we should camp for the night. But we had
scheduled an airdrop of food and equipment for the next morning, and I did not want to have to radio back and admit we could not reach our destination. In my inadequate Thai I argued with the team leader, a master sergeant who was not at all happy to have an American with him on the trip. After an angry discussion we started up again. We had been walking along a trail that continually wound around and rose slowly upward, but we now came to a steep straight shot. I figured that now we must be approaching the village. Wrong again. We had to do more climbing now than walking, slowly and painfully dragging ourselves up this precipice. Just about dusk we arrived at the village. We were a worn-out, haggard group. All the team members blamed me for their condition. After making arrangements for the morning parachute reception, I was given a spot on the floor in one of the hill-tribe houses. I broke open my sleeping bag and crawled in.

The next morning the Air America plane arrived on schedule and parachuted its load all over the adjacent forest, so we had to cut down a couple of huge trees to recover the equipment. We then had an egg, pepper, and bamboo shoot breakfast. I don't know where the cook learned his trade, but as the weeks progressed his meals grew from bad to intolerable. He gathered bamboo shoots as we walked along the trail, and he added them and the fiercely hot small green peppers to everything. On the three-week trip I lost 20 pounds down to 175, a weight I had not seen since late grammar school.

Having rested and eaten, I began to walk around the Yao village. This was my first opportunity to study a semi-primitive society. About two dozen bamboo houses with roofs of thatch were scattered on level spots at various intervals on the mountain. Livestock and chickens ran loose around the village, and the pigs seemed more wild than domesticated. The human and livestock traffic had worn paths between the houses. An elevated system of bamboo water pipes ensured a steady supply of water. The adjoining fields were alive with the reddish hues of the opium poppy, the main crop of this and most other hill villages. We ignored the poppy fields as we were here to make friends, not to cause problems. (There may have been other reasons for ignoring the poppies: some said that the counter-insurgency force got a rake-off from the opium traffic.)

The villagers resembled the Chinese, although they
seemed to be somewhat smaller. The men dressed in an assortment of Western and native clothes, the basic outfit being black pajamas. The women wore jacket-like blouses made of heavy red worsted yarn, loose-fitting dark trousers with fancy ornamental embroidery, and unusually colorful and decorative turbans around their hair. On festive occasions they added heavy silver neck loops and earrings, and sewed silver coins and buttons to the front and sides of the blouses.

At noontime, after a bamboo-shoot, pepper and Spam lunch, I went off to nap and recover from the long trip. I had been assigned a space on a raised bamboo platform inside the main house, a long rectangular structure with bamboo curtains to provide privacy. I had just lain down when a heavy, sweet smell permeated the air—the Yao men had lit their opium pipes prior to their mid-day nap.

That evening the village headman, a gentle, intelligent man who in his mid-forties was old by hill-tribe standards, threw a banquet for us. We all sat on the floor around low, square, bamboo-pole tables. The team leader took the opportunity to explain the program to the village headman and to introduce each individual team member. Since my demand that we continue the journey the day before, the team leader and I were not speaking, and I was the last to be (barely) introduced. The headman agreed to all facets of the program and said he would send some young men to Mae Rim, the headquarters of the counterinsurgency forces, for the training. He also said that in the morning we could pick out an appropriate site for the airstrip, and construction—using the tools dropped in the morning air delivery—could begin as soon as feasible.

The meal was served Chinese-style with individual bowls of rice and community bowls of meat and vegetables in the center for all to dip out of with their chopsticks. Just as I was about to dip into one attractive-looking dish, the Thai at my side nudged me and said in a low whisper that it was a dish of worms. My chopsticks made a quick turn into a more recognizable dish of pepper and bamboo shoots.

Over the next few days we located a potential airstrip site and began to clear and level it. The team medic treated a young child and gave the mother a supply of antibiotics. The mother, assuming that if one pill helped then the entire bottle would help more, gave her child the entire contents in one
dose. We sat up all night, hoping and praying that the child would not die. Fortunately, by morning, the child began to recover.

We remained in the village for four days and made all the arrangements for the airstrip and other facets of the program. We then moved on to the next village on the stop. Three weeks later we walked out of the mountains many miles away from our starting spot. Our team had the best record of any subsequent teams. We had built, or had arranged for the building of, airstrips in several villages. We had recruited the required number of potential trainees. We had made friends with the villagers and had accomplished everything required of us. I felt proud of a job well done, but was happy to get back to my more prosaic intelligence job.

I wanted to stay for another year in that beautiful area, but other Agency men were clamoring for a tour in the North. Dave Abbott, who had never forgiven me for refusing his recruitment attempt, quashed any efforts of the commander of the counterinsurgency force to have me remain.

On the day of my departure the entire counterinsurgency force turned out for a formal military review. I hated to leave. I really liked the Thai people and especially the men I had worked with. At the time I did not realize that my work in Thailand had been part of a plan by the President's national security advisers to develop and deploy CIA paramilitary capabilities around the world. I still naively believed the CIA's main purpose was to gather intelligence. I left the North with sadness, but with enormous pride in myself and in the CIA for having done an important job well.

That pride turned to bitterness and anger when I eventually learned of the fate of the hill-tribe villages my team had visited and tried to help. A few years later, because of growing communist influence in the Lao border area, the villages were shelled, bombed, and napalmed by the Thais. Our efforts had apparently laid the groundwork for the tragic destruction of the hill tribes.

7. HEADQUARTERS:

DUPING CONGRESS

IN mid-1964, after moving back into the house we had bought three years earlier in Herndon, Virginia, I returned to work at the Headquarters building in Langley. I was assigned to the Thai desk, where I was responsible for keeping track of the programs that I had worked on directly in Thailand. This was a paper-pushing job, and I soon longed to get back out into the field, a yearning shared by the majority of CIA case officers.

As part of my desk duties I evaluated our field intelligence reports, most of which covered the activities of the Communist Party of Thailand. Though I had been in North Thailand and reported on the party, I knew virtually nothing about it. I maintained a file of past CIA intelligence reports on the Thai Communists, and to evaluate the new reports I would review the more recent past reporting. If the new report was not too different, I would give it a good grade, adding some innocuous comment such as: “This report reinforces earlier indications on developments in the Communist Party of Thailand. We would wish for additional details on the size of the movement, particularly in the key Northeast area.”

Early on, the desk chief had warned me that if I wanted another tour in Thailand I should not be too critical of the station's reporting. He said the chiefs of station have long memories, and they do not like to receive criticism of station operations. So the operator who wanted to get ahead gave most reports at least a good rating. He said I should consider doing the same, “unless you feel strongly otherwise.” This was said more as a threat than anything else.

Once a week the Far East division chief, William E. Colby,
later to become CIA director, would sit down with all of the desk chiefs and review the reports and the various grades assigned by the desk officers to the reports. They would make a few comments, but for the most part they merely accepted the rating the individual desk officer had given a report. The comments coming from these meetings were more often platitudes than substantive criticisms. I realized I was just a junior case officer, and if this was how the game was played it certainly was okay with me. Also we lower-level officials lacked the “big picture” or “atmospherics.” If we had this special overview, as we were so often told, we would realize the correctness of this procedure. After the division chiefs' meeting, we desk officers prepared a dispatch forwarding to the station all of the comments on all of the reports. At the station the rating sheets were assessed with gravity. Each word was considered for any hidden meaning. For the rating sheets went out as Headquarters comments—not mine or any other desk officer's—and as such they carried the weight of knowledgeable authority.

One day, with other case officers from the Thai and Lao desks, I was called to a meeting in Colby's office. I was extremely pleased and flattered to be called in by the division chief. The purpose of the meeting was to lay the groundwork for a briefing Colby was going to present to a congressional committee concerning our efforts and plans in Laos. Colby stressed to us that congressional briefings were of the utmost importance. I and the others were to devote the entire next three weeks to preparing for his talk.

Colby was an unprepossessing, mild-mannered man you would never notice in a crowd. He had straight brown, gray-flecked hair and heavy glasses. When he talked to you, he devoted his entire attention to you and his eyes always seemed to express his understanding. His manner and attitude evoked confidence and trust. This was obviously one of the reasons he rose in the Agency. In the years hence I have watched him when I knew he was lying, and not the least flicker of emotion ever crosses his face. He comes across as completely honest and believable—a remarkable talent.

Colby emphasized the importance of selecting just the right words and charts to convey the desired impression to Congress. He regarded word usage as an art form, and he was a
master at it. He explained that the Agency had been working with the Hmong hill tribes in Laos for several years. (In fact, that was where my old paramilitary training friend Jimmy Moe had been sent.) We needed to increase the number of armed Hmong teams that we were directing in a fight against Communist Pathet Lao forces.

To sell the idea to Congress, Colby's briefing had to convey just the right impression—that the situation in Laos was extremely serious, but with a greater effort it was salvageable. The map depicting the contending forces had to be prepared to present just the proper balance between the Communist forces and those of the Lao government and our Hmong units. The chart had to show an extensive threat, but one that was ultimately controllable. Factual data had little part in the briefing material. One unfortunate fellow on an early version of the map used the color red to indicate the government/Hmong forces. This was completely unacceptable. Colby ordered that red could be used only for Communist forces.