Deadly Deceits (27 page)

Scott, my older son, was 16 when I returned. He had the long hair, the raggedy clothes, and the contempt of all things parental and traditional that was typical of the era. He and his friends wanted nothing to do with school activities, working, studying, and all the things that my generation felt were so necessary. His long hair drove me wild. Did not tradition, wisdom, and custom dictate that a clean shave and a close-cropped head of hair embodied respectability and goodness?

One day Scott and I had a confrontation in our downstairs rec room, Scott standing on one side of our pool table and I on the other like a pair of reluctant combatants. He had cut school and had been seen driving around town in his combination clubhouse-van with his buddies. I had been away in Vietnam, and he was not used to my authority. When I told him I was taking away his privilege of driving the van—part of his identity—he reacted angrily. The tension was considerable, but each of us was puzzled by the other. We had grown distant in the past year and a half, and neither knew just what to do. Norma finally stepped in and suggested a compromise, which I welcomed.

I had ambivalent feelings. The long-haired hippies were protesting the war, something I now wanted to do. Yet I could not apply those feelings to my own family. If I could accept one, I should have been able to accept the other. But I could not.

One day while attending the AID briefings in Georgetown, I decided to take a walk on the extended lunch break.
It was a hot summer day, but I was dressed in a dark blue suit and a tie. I carried a briefcase with me and must have appeared the typical bureaucrat.

That area of Georgetown was the gathering place of hippies. Young people in various stages of dress hung out or sat on second- and third-story window ledges, watching the passing scene. Observing the new culture, I strolled down M Street to Wisconsin Avenue, where young people were walking, lounging in doorways, holding hands, passing out leaflets, and conducting serious discussions. I felt out of place yet in sympathy with them. I wished I could join them. Two young girls in long, peasant-style dresses came up and asked if I would attend a performance of live theatre being held around the corner. I looked at them, expecting mockery, but there was none. I could not say it, but I felt close to them. I wanted to say yes, I agree the war should be stopped, what we are doing is evil and wrong, I want to shed my protecting suit and put on jeans and be one of you. But all these things I could not say or do.

12. DOWN AND OUT IN THAILAND

IN late September 1970, Norma, Scott, Dan, and I flew to Thailand, leaving the two girls behind in college. We soon found an apartment building located not far from the International School of Bangkok. A large number of American safe-haven families lived there to be near their husbands and fathers in Vietnam.

The American high school reflected the unhappiness and frustrations of the time for families. The school had earned a reputation for its high academic standards and strict discipline. On a previous tour our daughters had attended the school and had received a good education in a healthy atmosphere. But things had changed.

The school was now separated from the surrounding Thai community by an eight-foot-high fence topped by barbed wire. The shadow of the Vietnam War and the large military presence in Thailand brought increasing numbers of unhappy and alienated young people to the school. Many of them were the sons and daughters of military officials carrying out the war. Each morning these disaffected students had to endure a clothing inspection, filing into the school compound through a single narrow entrance. Those not properly dressed were sent home. Drug use was common. GIs on leave were ready sources, and directly outside the school, a vendor sold small bags of pot from a tea cart. For $10 students bought gum opium or vials of 98 percent pure heroin powder. Thai pharmacies sold barbiturates and amphetamines.

One night Norma and I were relaxing in our apartment just after dinner when a teenage girl started pounding at our door, screaming that her friend, Mary, was threatening to jump
off the roof. I dashed out the door and up the stairs with Norma close behind. Mary was sitting near the railing in one corner and was strangely quiet. We approached carefully to avoid scaring her, but when she did not seem aware of our presence, we rushed forward and grabbed her. I carried her downstairs to the apartment and put her on the couch.

Mary, her friend explained, had taken some pills and freaked out. I went two floors down to her apartment and the maid told me that Mary's parents would not be home for some time. Back upstairs everything was wild. Mary was thrashing about, hollering and screaming that she wanted to go back on the roof. We tried to placate her, but refused to let her leave. Moaning and mumbling, looking wildly at nothing, Mary started hallucinating, pointing at the wall, and crying out. Norma restrained her while I tried to call the American doctor, who was not available. Finally she relaxed and slowly drifted off to sleep shortly before her parents came to pick her up.

A few weeks later, a high school student living above us, whose father was a much-decorated Marine colonel in Vietnam, convulsed from an overdose of drugs and was rushed to the U.S. Military's Fifth Field Hospital, where he almost died. It was only after these incidents that I discovered that the leaders of the American community had kept a lid on stories about drug-related problems. I learned that in the 1971-1972 school year, six students died from overdoses. More than 20 percent of all official American families in Thailand had to return to the States before the end of their tours because of drug problems.

Scott's attitude remained the same as it had been back in Herndon. He wanted nothing to do with school and the traditional life I had always taken for granted. He would board the school bus each morning, but frequently got off and spent the day drifting around the city. He hated the school and the atmosphere and was confused by the events occurring all around him. He tried to convince us to send him back to the States. Finally, after months of discussion and an invitation for him to stay in the home of friends in Herndon, we relented. It seemed that this was the only acceptable alternative.

On Scott's last day in Thailand I took him to school to pick up his report card, which showed he had earned grades
from incomplete down to F. We sat in the car in the school parking lot and I tried to explain to him the necessity of an education.

“Scott,” I said, “for thousands of years, billions of people have all had the same thoughts and ideas that you have now. They have all lived through the same feelings you have now. And yet they have recognized that education is important. Can't you entertain the idea that you might be wrong?”

I knew some of what he was feeling. My own experiences with the Agency often made me feel that I was the only one who was right and everyone else was wrong.

That night we took Scott to Don Muang airport. Norma, Dan, and I tried to be cheerful, while hiding our sorrow. The plane was announced and he departed, leaving a gaping hole in our life.

My job as deputy chief of the anti-Communist Party operations branch required that I help the chief of the branch supervise the activities of a number of persons, mostly case officers working in liaison. But I soon realized that nothing had changed except my perception about the CIA's work. We were doing the same old things as before, collecting intelligence designed to support U.S. policy goals in Thailand. This meant, of course, supporting the military dictatorship in power and ignoring problems caused by it. For the most part we got our intelligence directly from the leaders themselves or our liaison counterparts, who never, never reported derogatory information about the regime. We lived in a fantasy world; conversations sounded like the movies. We all had assigned roles and lines. To speak outside of the script was to bring down the wrath of all. Even now I have difficulty understanding how we played the game.

As in Iran, Vietnam, Latin America, and other areas of the world, we only wanted intelligence that told us our policies were correct. We did not want to know that the U.S.-backed dictators brutalized their people and that those people were angry.

To avoid hearing such news, the Agency did not allow its case officers to maintain direct contact with the general
population. We sent case officers—only a few of whom knew the native language—on two-year tours. The case officers worked with the English-speaking members of the society's elite, never with the grubby working class. Although more than 80 percent of the Thai population are farmers, in 30 years there the Agency virtually never wrote an intelligence report based on an interview with a farmer (other than my survey reports). Instead it wrote reports on the problems government leaders-dictators were having with the rebellious people. If a language-qualified officer did develop contacts with the working classes and began getting information from them, he was immediately labeled derisively as having “gone native” and was soon on his way back to the States. I had seen the same pattern in Taiwan years before, but it hadn't occurred to me that anything was wrong. And we continue to see the same pattern today, as Agency bungling of intelligence in, among others, Iran and El Salvador in recent years have shown.

Thailand station was a large installation and its activities demonstrate many of the things that were wrong with the CIA. The station conducted a wide range of covert operations: counterinsurgency, psychological, paramilitary, external political and others. Here are some examples.

Counterinsurgency. Thailand station in 1970 performed as I expected in this field.
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Neither the station's operational efforts nor its reporting acknowledged the main focus of communist activity—the secret development of a massive rural political organization among the peasantry. No one seemed to know anything about the communist village organization.

A major problem was that top officials in the Thai station simply did not have the experience and knowledge necessary to run a decent operation. As an example, one day in early 1971 I attended a meeting with the head of a prominent counterinsurgency organization, whom I shall call General Chamnong, and several other officers. The purpose of the meeting was to permit the deputy chief of station to brief General Chamnong on his views of how Chamnong's organization should counter insurgency.
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Since the deputy chief of station had called for this
special meeting, Chamnong expected some major pronouncement. Instead the deputy chief of station, relatively new to Southeast Asia, offered the full American litany on recommended counterinsurgency programs and actions. His main point was that General Chamnong's unit should be used to cut the links between the communist guerrillas and the villagers. To emphasize his point, the deputy chief drew a representation of a village on a piece of paper and then encircled the village—the circle representing that unit's “link-cutting” operation. We older hands realized that in any province, General Chamnong's organization had perhaps one effective officer. That individual would be hard pressed just handling his responsibilities in the capital of the province. Visiting numerous isolated villages and then cutting the links between the villagers and the guerrillas was not even a remote possibility.

General Chamnong, never at a loss for words, regurgitated the deputy chief's ritualistic counterinsurgency chant. That weird exchange went on for about an hour. Later Chamnong admitted the meeting had confused and worried him. He did not know if the deputy chief was angry or if there was some undecipherable message contained in his words. Mercifully, Chamnong did not realize that the deputy chief had only presented his honest recommendation for a counterinsurgency program.

Psychological Warfare Operations
. To judge from press accounts, Thailand station created a number of small disasters in this area. Hoping to stimulate the Thai government to greater anti-communist efforts and simultaneously to trick the Communist Party into believing its leadership was divided on the question of armed versus peaceful revolution, the station allegedly composed and wrote a letter to the Prime Minister. According to accounts in both the American and Thai press, the station in late 1973 sent a forged letter to the Prime Minister in the name of a leading official of the Communist Party in Northeast Thailand. The letter offered an insulting cease-fire to the Thai government in return for local autonomy in “liberated areas” near Laos.
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According to press accounts, the CIA man in Sakorn Nakorn mailed it from there.
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When the Prime Minister received the letter, he vehemently and publicly rejected its offer and decried the arrogance of the Communist Party in the
press. Apparently all was well and the operation a success. However, a reporter became suspicious. He acquired a copy of the letter and traced it back to Sakorn Nakorn. Tracing the letter was easy, because the man who mailed it had been impressed by the addressee and had decided it was too important to send by regular mail. He registered the return address to what the press referred to as the “CIA office” in Sakorn Nakorn. When the story broke, it created a barrage of anti-CIA articles in the Thai press, all indignant about the CIA's meddling in Thai affairs. That CIA operation accomplished what years of communist propaganda had been unable to do—it created anti-American demonstrations among normally pro-American Thais.

To top that bungled operation, a short while later one of our case officers attempted to recruit a Thai in a Bangkok coffee shop. The Thai man recorded and reported the attempted recruitment. The story broke and Thai-American relations fell to their lowest point. Not much later, Sam's principal agent, mentioned earlier, the former Communist Party central committee member who supposedly had created a splinter group to follow the peaceful path to revolution, decided to join the attack. He wrote a book about CIA activities in Thailand.
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