Deadly Deceits (26 page)

The police arrested more than 50 persons, 41 of whom ultimately were tried and convicted. The net had penetrated upper echelons of South Vietnamese society and government, including businessmen, military officers, teachers, students, and two top officials in the “open arms” program which was supposed to encourage Viet Cong to defect to the government. President Thieu's special assistant for political affairs, Huynh Van Trong, held the highest office. His Communist superior, however, Vu Ngoc Nha, possessed the most influence and was a close friend of President Thieu.

Nha confessed and said he had joined the Communist Party in 1949. In 1955 he came south in the CIA-generated refugee migration to set up an intelligence net, which had
achieved some success before Diem's police rolled it up. Following Diem's fall in 1963 the new government released thousands of political prisoners, including Nha and all of his group. Nha arranged to have all record of his group's activities removed from police files and destroyed. The only report he did not get was the one old, tattered, English-language translation that had somehow ended up in the Projectile file cabinet. After a short cooling-off period, Nha rebuilt his net. The Catholics accepted him as a leading intellectual and made him an important member of their group. He served as President Thieu's adviser on Catholic affairs and was instrumental in having Thieu appoint Trong as his special assistant.

Trong confessed and said he attained that position through Nha's intercession with Thieu. Nha had recruited Trong by promising him the position of presidential special assistant. Trong understandably did not know where the power lay in Thieu's administration. Once, Trong had taken an official trip to the United States and held discussions over a period of weeks with top-level officials in our government. Upon returning to South Vietnam, he went directly to Thieu's office. Nha was with Thieu. Thieu ordered an immediate oral report of the trip. Trong said he was a little abashed to give his report simultaneously to the President and his own Communist superior. Later he compiled a written report for Thieu and gave a duplicate to Nha.

Our office wrote an intelligence report based on Trong's confession. Langley nit-picked and questioned its validity. We rechecked all details and forwarded those results to Headquarters. Langley finally permitted limited dissemination of that report to the U.S. intelligence community. While our Projectile operation had been successful beyond any of my dreams, this was obviously not the kind of success that the CIA's top officials wanted to see. For the report of the Projectile operation showed that our ally in this longest of wars had a government so riddled by enemy spies that they were able to operate under the nose of the President. It provided further evidence that the CIA had not only stubbornly refused to see the strength of the enemy but also had never acknowledged the weakness of our “friends.” To me, it was obvious that we were bolstering a hopelessly corrupt government that had neither the support nor the respect of the Vietnamese people. This was not
welcome news to the Agency or to U.S. policymakers who had invested so much money and human life in this futile struggle.

The success of the Projectile operation would seem at first glance to support William Colby's statement in his book,
Honorable Men
, that CIA officers in the early 1970s “… were getting more—and more accurate—reports from inside VCI [Viet Cong infrastructure] provincial committees and regional [Communist] party headquarters from brave Vietnamese holding high ranks in such groups. They had been first identified by people who knew them, then recruited by our intelligence officers.”
³⁶
But if I could reveal the identity of our source on the Projectile operation, it would lend no support to Colby's contention, which is pure fantasy. The truth is that never in the history of our work in Vietnam did we get one clear-cut, high-ranking Viet Cong agent. The Agency, in collaboration with the South Vietnamese intelligence services, developed hundreds of so-called access agents. Yet one purge of its agent lists saw more than 300 dropped for fabrication or lack of contact. Despite a single-minded determination to recruit a valid penetration of the Viet Cong, the Agency failed. The chief of station, desperate to prod his troops, offered an on-the-spot promotion to the officer able to recruit a province-level communist agent. No one earned that promotion. The fact that neither we, nor the South Vietnamese government, could produce one valid high-level reporting communist penetration agent is a comment on
Honorable Men
and on the South Vietnamese attitude toward the Diem, Ky, and Thieu regimes. The Viet Cong, on the other hand, had thousands of penetrations into the South Vietnamese government.

There were a few others within the Agency who were noticing the same things that I was. In May 1969 two analysts at Langley, Sam Adams and Robert Klein, using some of our Projectile material, began trying to estimate the number of spies in Thieu's government. Adams told a top official in the South Vietnam branch of the Directorate for Operations that he had discovered references in various documents indicating that there were more than 1,000 communist agents in Thieu's government. The official said: “For God's sake, don't open that Pandora's box. We have enough trouble as it is.” In late November 1969, Klein and Adams compiled a report concluding that the total number of Viet Cong agents in the South
Vietnamese army and government was in the neighborhood of 30,000. If that report had been made public, it would have had enormous ramifications. How could we continue to support a government and army that were so widely infiltrated, that obviously had no hope of standing on their own? But the Agency forbade dissemination of that report. Both Adams and Klein later quit the CIA.

The follow-up to the serendipitous arrest of the head of another intelligence net during the roll-up of Nha's group occupied much of the time of the police and my office. That accidentally apprehended Communist intelligence officer, Van Khien, had led a North Vietnamese military intelligence operation into command elements of the South Vietnamese army (ARVN). Van Khien refused to talk, but careful checking, investigation, and police action located 10 members of his net. From that point we continued to unravel leads from Khien's and Nha's nets and other nets, arresting agents in two- and three-man increments.

Intelligence production from my office continued at an average of 25 reports a month. My officers were forbidden by the station from attempting to recruit their police liaison counterparts, so I had now more than fulfilled all of Shack-ley's requirements for promotion. Herman, before he left for a better job in the station, wrote a fitness report for me. It was highly complimentary but not enough so to bring about the automatic promotion as dictated by Shackley's guidelines. I gathered together the office logs and made an appointment with Herman.

I went over my accomplishments since taking over the job as officer in charge of special police—the increase in quantity and quality of reports, the Projectile net, the ARVN net. “You know my case officers are forbidden to attempt unilateral recruitments,” I said, “but in Shackley's two remaining categories for promotion I have the best record in the station. I have more than fulfilled all the requirements you have been harping on, and now I deserve and expect a promotion.”

“You know, Ralph,” Herman said, “there are various people in this station younger than I am who are higher grades.
But I can't let this bother me. I just do my job the best I can. I recommend that you do the same.”

“Are you telling me that you and Shackley have no intention of honoring your pledge?”

Herman was disconcerted by my question. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and then responded, “Ralph, did you really believe he meant that? If you did, you are naive.”

We talked for an hour, but he would not rewrite the fitness report. Months later Herman's deputy came to my office. He said that I was not in the just-completed round of GS-13 promotions but that I would be promoted the following year.

Herman was replaced by a Shackley protégé from the European division I shall call Harry. He had not particularly wanted to come to Vietnam and quickly proved to me that he was an incompetent flake. In a matter of weeks he destroyed all that I had so carefully built. He assigned key positions to officers from the European division who had been drafted for a tour in Vietnam. These new European case officers were inexperienced and not overly motivated. The old Vietnam hands, transferred to less attractive junior assignments, became bitter and uncooperative. The results were predictable and immediate. For the last three months of my tour we did not produce one intelligence report. Harry blamed me for the fall in production, but the trend continued for at least another year after I left. Harry, based on his unquestioning loyalty to Shackley, eventually attained supergrade rank and assignment to an important overseas post.

When it was time for me to go home, the head of the special police awarded me a medal and at the ceremony draped across my shoulders the Viet Cong flag that had flown over Saigon's central marketplace at the height of the Tet offensive. He entreated me to stay, and so did various station officers, but I couldn't wait to get out of that desolate country.

At the airport, I had an hour's wait before my plane took off. I sat down at a table in the dirty terminal restaurant and ordered a beer. A Eurasian who spoke fair English joined me. We exchanged casual conversation for a while, and then he asked if I would mind carrying a suspicious-looking package to the States for him. It struck me as absurd and ironic that the last thing I was being asked to do on my Vietnam tour was to transport heroin back to the United States. I told the man
to go to hell.

My plane took off, and I sat by the window looking down at all the bomb pockmarks in the Vietnamese landscape. There seemed no hope for this poor, tortured country nor for ours. How many more Vietnamese and Americans would die here? How many more civilians would we kill, how many children would we napalm? Nothing seemed capable of stopping the U.S. juggernaut from pursuing its own fantasies. Certainly my own efforts to stop it had been in vain. The reality that I had seen and reported and urged my superiors to recognize had been totally rejected. The fantasies and illusions lived on.

I thought back to the time in Gia Dinh Province when I had planned to kill myself as a way of protesting all the things the Agency had done to create the bestial inhumanity of the Vietnam War. I had seen at first hand the ubiquitous refugee camps inhabited by scarred children and old people who had been bombed out of their villages and forced into those abysmal hovels. I again visualized the panic and pain of the children and could smell the stench of their burning flesh as they ran from the napalm. These things and others the CIA through its false information and covert operations had brought forth and, at that point in Gia Dinh, I had chosen to live by promising that some day I would expose the Agency's role in Vietnam. As I looked down on the battered countryside I renewed that promise and swore never to rest until I fulfilled that commitment.

I was glad to be going home. But I knew I would never be the same person again. All of my ideals of helping people, all my convictions about the processes of intelligence, all my respect for my work, all the feelings of joy in my life, all my concepts of honor, integrity, trust and love, all in fact that had made me what I was, had died in Vietnam. Through its blindness and its murders, the Agency had stolen my life and my soul. Full of anger, hatred, and fear, I bitterly contemplated a dismal future.

11. COMING HOME

The director of the Agency for International Development, John Hannah,… “acknowledged today that the USAID program is being used as a cover for operations of the CIA.…”
¹

BEFORE leaving Saigon, I had asked for and been granted another tour in Thailand. I did not particularly want to go there or anywhere with the Agency, but if I had to remain with the CIA, being with my family overseas in Thailand seemed the least objectionable option.

I first had to return to Washington from Saigon
[14 words deleted]
. AID conducted several weeks of briefings in the old street-car barn just across Key Bridge in Georgetown for
[one word deleted]
and retired police officials recruited for overseas slots. I looked for a job during free periods between briefings and later during several weeks of home leave. Again security was an insurmountable problem. Unable to admit CIA employment and with no apparent salable talents, I could not find other employment.

The few weeks between my return from Saigon and our moving to Thailand were difficult for the family and me. Norma took my brooding silence personally. She had vehemently proclaimed so many times that she never wanted to go overseas again, especially to Thailand, and here we were making travel plans. Her attempts to talk with me about our problems got nowhere. I either shouted her down or, when that didn't work, rushed out of the house. It seemed that I had lost the ability to communicate with anyone.

I did not want my children damaged by my experiences, so I tried to protect them from the causes of my problems. In
the years after we told the children I worked for the CIA, I had talked, even boasted, about the Agency and the good it was doing in the world. This was particularly true during my last tour in Thailand, where I constantly preached that we were fighting the communist murderers. The children had absorbed my teachings. Now I had changed but could not and would not explain this to them.

My older daughter, Peggy, thoroughly indoctrinated by me about the Agency and its benefits to the world, carried these views with her to college. She attended Wellesley College while I was serving in Vietnam. One day the professors and students held an anti-war protest, but Peggy refused to join them. Almost alone of the staff and students, she went to all her classes in a counter protest.