Nation-Builders, Old Pros, Paramilitary Boys, and Misplaced Persons
Smith, Joseph Burkholder
Nation-Builders, Old Pros, Paramilitary Boys, and Misplaced Persons by Joseph Burkholder Smith Nobody has yet come out and said that the CIA is to blame for the precipitous collapse of South...
...Thus, although Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell lost their jobs before 1961 had ended, Tracy Barnes had a new division created for him, Domestic Operations Division, and Howard Hunt went to work for him...
...Snepp is right in criticizing the CIA for its part in the abandonment of Vietnamese who had come to rely on us...
...The CIA’s Liberals The nation-builders were the officers who came to Vietnam straight from the Philippine operations, or their spiritual descendants...
...objective toward the country of concern might be...
...officers in the Arm “The majority of my colleagues ligence Corps...
...their main allegiance was to using gung-ho techniquesparatroopers, guerilla warfare -to accomplish the CIA’s goals in Vietnam...
...He joined the CIA to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam...
...The old-pro intelligence officers saw things more narrowly...
...King and began traveling around Latin America to drum up projects for spending our new funds...
...over story...
...tried to recruit me to go to Miami by saying, ‘It will be good for your career...
...Faced with the choice between no protection at all from the U.S...
...In short, the CIA, as bureaucratic organizations often do, went charging full steam down an impracticable path in Vietnam...
...At the height of the war, the CIA needed so many people in Vietnam that all divisions of Clandestine Services had to send a quota of 20 per cent of their agents there...
...I guess some of these transplanted rewrite men must have been given impressivesounding titles like “strategy analyst...
...Because of their refusal to accept as fact the imminence of the communist victory, says Snepp, there was no time to prepare a careful and thorough evacuation operation...
...These free-lance paramilitary boys were a motley crew: soldiers of fortune, ex-Green Berets, ex-paratroopers...
...The agency had people trained to organize a counter-intelligence effort in Saigon...
...On Getting Ahead: great adventure, was career tunism...
...Snepp has some valuable things to say about the CIA, and some things he doesn’t describe directly-the forces that underlay the errors he recounts-are particularly important to understand in order to avoid future mistakes...
...The State Department has never permitted CIA officers to be integrated into the Foreign Service as Foreign Service Officers, which would be the ideal cover...
...They were always called boys, although some of them were well into middle age, because of their enthusiastic, super-macho style...
...All this had worked in the Philippines (never mind whether it was right), so the CIA assumed it would work in Vietnam...
...Eventually the CIA saw that it was unwise to send all of its promising young manpower on high-risk missions in Vietnam, - so it devised another system for filling its heavy personnel needs in Southeast Asia...
...Many of the American and Filipino agents who had run the Philippine operation were there as well, along with scores of other CIA personnel...
...This stand was not based solely on religious conviction: the CIA’s people couldn’t speak Vietnamese...
...Being natural, the social structure was presumed to be anticommunist...
...You better join us before it‘s too late and you’ve missed the boat.’ ” On Relations with Other Agencies: “The Operations Coordination Board, OCB, was established by the National Security Council to insure all operations of all U.S...
...Tang told Dawson how much fun he had had duping the CIA’S Vietnamese allies and gave him an autographed pith helmet when Dawson left Saigon...
...Here are a few tidbits: 3n the Early Days of the Agency: wearing hats...
...We sized up the situation hot according to what it required, but acdording to the precopceptions of the American officials in charge...
...Dave Phillips, the propaganda chief of the task force with whom I worked...
...But many of them were genuinely young too, apprentice officers on their first assignment...
...But Dulles cheerfully ignored all this evidence...
...Hats had disappeared “Employees were instructed never from the dress of younger men...
...that was the conventional wisdom around the agency...
...They were the conspicuous consumers of the embassy...
...Non-CIA American personnel in Vietnam, the nation-builders felt, didn’t understand the Vietnamese and were blunderers and second-raters as well...
...He didn’t because he was committed to an impossible policy and was trying desperately hard to make it work...
...A division chief, like a pro football coach when there’s an expansion draft, will always put his best players on the protected list...
...Those who were more in the know would say, “Helms doesn’t like it at all, but he can’t do anything about it...
...People in the field were under a lot of pressure, and were thought to be unable to produce thoughtful and thorough analyses...
...Nation-Builders, Old Pros, Paramilitary Boys, and Misplaced Persons by Joseph Burkholder Smith Nobody has yet come out and said that the CIA is to blame for the precipitous collapse of South Vietnam in April 1975, but a couple of recent books come close...
...In the all about it when yo :ssential matter of a credit reference tine Services training ’or landlords and opening bank and may take a while, I w #hopping accounts, every employee suspense...
...The idea was that analysts, at a distance from the sources of raw reports and with large stores of other information at their command, could make better sense of a critical situation than a man on the spot could...
...Being part of a major disaster always led to success in the Clandestine Services for officers below the very top...
...His Strong Inclination Still, it’s probably true that Polgar’s strong inclination, and the strong inclination of his superiors at the CIA, the State Department, and the White House, was to ignore intelligence that differed from what he wanted to hear...
...This was a method of opera- what a victory over Castro would tion which became the basis of many mean to them...
...The paramilitary boys were of varying ideologies...
...When the assignment came through he protested, but he was told that if he didn’t take it he would never be able to go overseas again, which would seriously cripple his CIA career...
...The United States also sent vast military and economic aid to South Vietnam, but it was the CIA that midwifed the rebirth of South Vietnam...
...In 1954 our best statistics showed that despite years of ardent effort by French priests, only 1.5 million of the 20 million Vietnamese had been converted to Catholicism...
...The CIA staff in Saigon were readily identifiable to everybody else because they had 25-percent salary increases, their own hotel, swimming pools, special doctors, paid vacations, separation allowances for their families, and Ford Pintos...
...They are 55 Days by Alan Dawson, who was UPI’s last Saigon bureau chief and stayed on for five months after the communist takeover...
...This situation was especially bad in Saigon because the CIA felt it necessary to sweeten the bitter dose of a Saigon assignment (especially for the discontented misplaced persons) by throwing in various perquisites...
...We obviously weren’t going to launch a nuclear strike against the Russians...
...These requisitioned agents were the misplaced persons...
...As a result, station reports officers, who in the old days were mainly proofreaders, became more important-after all, now that the President was reading reports from the field, those reports had to be well written...
...Building nations might be the long-range goal, they thought, but the CIA’s primary role was to gather intelligence and mount protective counter-intelligence operations to maintain the United States’ position...
...and Decent Interval by Frank Snepp, a CIA officer in Saigon who quit the agency because he felt it was covering up its own blunders in the final days of South Vietnam...
...The reason why Vietnam was such a big deal for the CIA goes back to the beginning of the Cold War...
...it also was supposed to contain the spread of what we used to call “world communism,” in every comer of, the globe...
...I think he’s wrong in not placing that crime in its larger context...
...I was stationed in Singapore then, and British intelligence officers there told me that they thought the United States was mad to try to prop up South Vietnam...
...Two months later, Ho Chi Minh’s forces beat the French at Dien Bien Phu, and in went the CIA...
...The result was that every point was compromised so that, in the end, no one’s toes were tread upon, but no action responsibilities were ever put in forceful terms or even very clearly...
...As might be imagined, the way they were selected meant that they were often the people with the lowest efficiency ratings in the divisions that were forced to make them available...
...Jake, the man who directed all daily operations of the Cuban task force, serving directly under Barnes, was made chief of operations for the entire Western Hemisphere Division...
...The agency began to hire temporary employees on contract, for paramilitary assignments...
...the regular Far East staff just wasn’t big enough...
...I recall sitting on OCB panels on Indonesia and Malaya...
...It‘s the best way to be anonymous,’ John replied...
...It had experts in psychological warfare and covert political action who could help keep a pro-American government in the South strong...
...intelligence fdes) were just left behind...
...From that vantage point, you see some things and don’t see others...
...Besides reflecting the size of the station, the existence of the job was also the product of a trend in intelligence reporting...
...On Deciding to Intervene in Indonesia (and in Chile): ‘ So we began to feed the State and Defense departments intelligence that no one could deny was a useful contribution to understanding Indonesia...
...Army and two years in the embassy in Saigon,” he writes, “I reluctantly opted for the latter...
...If the CIA really did botch things so totally, it’s worth looking for the reasons why so it won’t happen again...
...But Smith’s book provides the most convincing picture available of what life in the CIA was really like and as such it deserves to be ressurected...
...Headquarters made a considerable effort to deny this, but the facts of organizational life always prevail in such situations...
...No one from Polgar on up wanted to hear that the end in Vietnam had finally come and that it was so completely ignominious...
...The people in the CIA who were good at writing reports were the analysts back in Langley, so they were often just shipped over to field stations to do their rewrites, which could th’en be labeled field appraisals...
...Originally, CIA field stations were responsible only for collecting raw intelligence-that is, stolen documents and reports by secret agents...
...Only the CIA at that moment had the ability to do the job...
...When Joseph B. Smith’s book, Portrait of a Cold Warrior, was published by Putnam in 1976, it attracted practically no attention, perhaps because it made no sensational disclosures about the CIA, as other books did at the time...
...While I think Snepp is quite right in saying the station grievously ignored its responsibility to the Vietnamese, I think he didn’t know about some of the other problems his chief, Tom Polgar, was busy facing...
...But still more people were needed, and the agency began requisitioning a quota from all divisions of Clandestine Services...
...In the statement is false tha took to intervene in the af countries like Chile only ordered to do so by the mittee, the Special Group, Committee, or the 40 Comm small group of top Na officials who acted in name under these throughout the cold war...
...It was Polgar’s job to keep them at least slightly invisible, and to prevent the regular State Department staff from undergoing fits of jealousy at the perks their CIA brethren were getting...
...Dave Phillips went off to a senior field assignment in Mexico City...
...They vere young...
...The South Vietnamese government at the time was headed by Emperor Bao Dai, a puppet of the fast-retreafing French...
...The South Vietnamese based Joseph B. Smith wasa high offcialof the CIA until he retired from the agency, after 25 years in it, in 19 75 their highlands battle maps on plans made by one of their intelligence sergeants, a man named Le Er Tang...
...The blood and money squandered in Vietnam from the moment John Foster Dulles refused to accept the reality of French defeat bore down too heavily on their better judgment...
...I once suggested that we propagandize using themes promoting pride in the native Cao Dai religion, contrasting its (and o<ur) openness to new ideas with the closed ideology of communism...
...Someone said to the Philippine election ca 1959, ‘If you win, you’ll be the second Ed Lansdale...
...Soon Colonel Edward Lansdale, the CIA man who had masterminded the Philippine success and discovered Magsaysay, was in Saigon with his new protege, Ngo Dinh Diem, known to everyone in the agency as “Lansdale’s new Magsaysay...
...What are we doing there...
...his job was primarily to safeguard the role his agency wanted to play in regard to it...
...Both writers accuse the CIA of fairly spectacular incompetepce-usually the least of the charges that are levied against the agency, and something that I, as a moderately loyal former CIA agent, find troubling...
...So thousands of Vietnamese friendly to the United States (and mountains of U.S...
...President Kennedy made it known that he preferred reading the direct and immediate reports of people in the field to the convoluted hedging that the analysts at Langley often produced...
...Throughout his book, Snepp provides examples of field appraisals he wrote that he couldn’t get Polgar to accept as the true picture of events...
...Frank Snepp was a misplaced person...
...Yet no same way, tucked low over their me bothered to give new employees a brows...
...His book shows Polgar and the American ambassador, Graham Martin, delibera tely misrepresenting intelligence information in their reports back home...
...if he had succeeded, there would have been no need to worry about anti-communist Vietnamese desperately trying to escape or files falling into enemy hands...
...They were living in a dream world...
...It had paramilitary specialists who could help the South Vietnamese reorganize their armed forces...
...Obviously Polgar’s position with the American ambassador was a delicate one, made more delicate because the ambassador was technically his boss...
...The exceptions were men it is essential for a secret agent to weal ibout ten years older than the rest, ahat.’ vho always entered the cafeteria “ ‘How’s that again?’ “ ‘You gotta wear a hat...
...He would immediately change the way persist en t problems were being handled to fit the way he had successfully handled something completely different elbwhere...
...On April 28, 1975, Tang disappeared, but his superiors didn’t notice his absence, since most of them had already fled to Guam or the Philippines...
...The Hungarians and Poles were members of the International Commission of Control and Supervision, an organization established to oversee the 1973 Vietnam cease-fire agreement...
...Anyway, Frank Snepp ended up in Saigon...
...The CIA’S less-secret Directorate of Intelligence, not the field stations or Clandestine Services, did all the analysis...
...He first worked as an analyst of NATO affairs in the European division...
...He explained, ngenuity of the employee...
...They’re very intelligent examples of interpretive work...
...There are two important lessons to be drawn from the events Snepp describes: that policymakers will ignore intelligence that shows they have taken the wrong course of action, and that CIA stations will oblige this inclination by providing intelligence that shows the policymakers they were right...
...The CIA’s Clandestine Services was, from the early fifties on, the unofficial Cold War arm of the U.S...
...government...
...He surely knew this was a gamble, but it did have a worthy object...
...North Vietnam’s conquest of this territory led to the panic and, soon afterwards, the total disintegration of the South Vietnamese military forces...
...The nation-builders wanted to save the Vietnamese from totalitarianism, and they saw the CIA as the best means to that end because it was clandestine and flexible, lowprofile, and immune from political pressures...
...As is usually the case at CIA stations, cover was inadequate to nonexistent...
...As such, it did not just collect intelligence...
...Ho Chi Minh’s armies, or their civilian allies, controlled most of South Vietnam...
...Not o reveal the fact that they worked for only did these older men wear hats...
...Presidents Johnson and Nixon, though not the voracious readers of intelligence reporting that Kennedy was, shared his feelings about the relative merits of intellectuals and men of action...
...But they’re short of hard facts, which are the only thing that would give a CIA station chief the bureaucratic muscle to go successfully over an ambassador’s head...
...And that was the moment when we got involved in Vietnam...
...Where a new member of “I couldn’t help he Clandestine Services told his the hat wearers to ieighbors he worked was left to the John...
...So Polgar spent his time trying to negotiate some sort of settlement through the Hungarians and the Poles...
...Still, the CIA was accustomed to using priests as the principal agents of its propaganda operations in Indochina...
...Certainly most of the anticommunist Vietnamese who we didn’t have time to evacuate were “relocated” (that is, in many cases, killed) by the vichrious North Vietnamese...
...It set up a program to relocate refugees from North Vietnam...
...were keenly aware o “A flaw in us all, in those days power...
...When the application to “volunteer” for that division’s Vietnam quota showed up in his office one day, some of his colleagues jokingly filled in his name without his knowledge...
...At best, the misplaced persons had little feel for the situation, scant interest in their assignments, and not much effectiveness in contributing to the Saigon station’s demanding mission...
...During the 195Os, the State Department phased out its own Foreign Service Reserve officers at embassies, and real Foreign Service Staff employees are now only clerical...
...As the CIA representative, 1 was always instructed to say nothing specific but to insist that what we might do about any matter was to be subsumed under some such clause as ‘other agencies will take appropriate action.’ ” On the Aftermath of the Bay of Pigs: “A familiar experience was seeing all those who had been directly responsible for the Bay of Pigs operation being promoted...
...But the Filipinos are predominantly Catholic, while the Vietnamese are Buddhists or followers of eclectic native religions like Cao Dai...
...According to the FBI training manual, John said, a hat makes it difficult for an onlooker, a passer-by, and, most importrtant of all, the secret agent’s enemies, to identify the person wearing it...
...Frank Snepp also accuses Polgar of this, and of far worse too...
...No doubt Snepp’s book is causing apoplexy at CIA headquarters, which is too bad, because it deserves to be studied rather than just damned as a security breach...
...So CIA field stations began to prepare lengthy reports to be read directly by policymakers who wanted the best possible feel for the situation...
...Thus in every embassy there were these peculiar people, occupying offices apart from the rest of the staff (the top three floors in Saigon were offlimits to State Department employees), bearing strange job titles, and usually listed in the State Department register as Foreign Service Reserve officers...
...The Conventional Wisdom From the mid-sixties on, anyone I met in the halls of the CIA’S Langley headquarters was likely to tell me that we had too many people in Vietnam...
...In March 1954 Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said, “Under the conditions of today, the imposition on Southeast Asia of the political system of Communist Russia and its Chinese ally, by whatever means, will be a grave threat to the whole free community...
...It even brought in a Filipino CIA collaborator to write the new Vietnamese constitution...
...officers...
...agencies working abroad acheived some common purpose...
...It was alwayi fascinating when a new chief of station came on the scene...
...Snepp’s job in Vietnam was strategy analyst, a task so specialized that any field station less huge than the one in Saigon would be unlikely to have anyone doing it full time...
...Five days later, he resurfacedas Captain Tang, chief of the North Vietnamese military battalion in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon...
...people assigned to other countries would ask...
...Ergo, wear a hat and be difficult to spot...
...Polgar, says Dawson, saw the Eastern European communists on the commission as a key conduit to settlement with the North Vietnamese, which they weren’t...
...This was a comfortable pattern for the priests, but completely lost on the Vietnamese...
...In other words, to anyone vaguely familiar with the Foreign Service system it was clear who the spooks were...
...The ambassador and his staff also began to comment on the field reports...
...Dawson also accused Tom Polgar, the last CIA station chief in Saigon, of spending his time dealing with a side issue of diplomacy rather than the war it self-bargaining with Hungarian and Polish representatives in Saigon...
...Even the CIA’s own National Intelligence Estimate said the chances of survival of any non-communist government in the South were near zero...
...All CIA officers are given the title of Foreign Service Reserve officer or, if they’re lowranking, Foreign Service Staff employee...
...i t took ten years for the Clandestine Services to realize that the quiet man in the corner in the hat was the most conspicuous person on the block, not the least...
...Men of action--a Kennedy or a Nixon or a high CIA official-don’t, once they’re launched on a course, relish turning back...
...It built mass anti-communist organizations...
...They weren’t known for their maturity...
...When they had read enough alarming reports, we planned to spring the suggestion we should support the colonels’ plans to reduce Sukarno’s of the political action a the 1960s and 1970s...
...Even if Polgar had decided to confront Martin, he lacked the kind of intelligence information he needed to do so...
...The United States feels that the possibility should not be passively accepted but should be met by united action...
...What Polgar should have realized is that the gamble wasn’t going to work...
...instances, we made the grams up ourselves after lected enough intelligen them appear required stances...
...All these were seasoned personnel: they were fresh from the Philippines, where they had helped defeat the communist Hukbalahap uprising and elect Ramon Magsaysay president...
...This is the constant, painful problem CIA officers face in every important moment, and it has haunted the agency for 30 years...
...And in the early fifties, our army wasn’t trained for the alternative means of stopping communism -count e r-i n su r g e n cy work...
...Gerry Droller became a special assistant for political operations to J.C...
...Since the Kennedy Admjnistration, CIA station chiefs have operated under written instructions that make it explicitly clear that the ambassador is in charge of all activities of all components of the U.S...
...It was a touchy situation, requiring great skill at office politics...
...By the time the events Frank Snepp and Alan Dawson describe overtook the country, the CIA’s personnel in Vietnam could be put 26 into four general categories: the nation-builders, the old-pro “classical” intelligence officers, the paramilitary boys, and the misplaced persons...
...mission...
...During the sixties and early seventies, however, the reporting system changed...
...he Clandestine Services nor even but they nearly all wore them the idmit they worked for CIA...
...First of all, these was given the same name to use-Viola either former FBI men or ’itts, 2430 “E” Street, N.W...
...During an earlier stint as ambassador to Thailand, Graham Martin had thrown General Richard Stilwell, chief of the military aid mission there, out of Bangkok to show that he took this 30 directive seriously...
...He wanted intelligence that agreed with his decision to go into Vietnam...
...Being a man of action, Kennedy instinctively felt the man on the spot knew what he was talking about better than some closeted intellectual scholar...
...I was told this couldn’t be done-our people were Catholics and wouldn’t talk to Cao Dai followers...
...hey were the CIA’s liberals: they believed the, United States had to understand “the hearts and minds of the people” of Southeast Asia, and then help those people reinforce their natural social structure...
...Dawson says the South Vietnamese Central Intelligence Agency, a creation of our CIA, repeatedly fed President Thieu and his generals false information about the location of the North Vietnamese army during the crucial highlands campaign of March 1975...
...Each agency representative had obviously been briefed about whatever the proposed U.S...
...It created the Vietnamese intelligence and public information services...
Vol. 9 • February 1978 • No. 12
