A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  President Johnson was so upset by the Wise Men’s assessment and advice that on March 27 he summoned Carver and General DePuy to the White House to repeat their briefings for his benefit. Half an hour after this session, Carver returned to the Agency and slipped into my office to report. Slumped in a chair too big for him, George looked like the bedraggled sparrow that had taken a shortcut across a badminton court. The briefing, which may have been the longest LBJ ever sat through, had lasted more than an hour, punctuated by the President’s frequent interruptions, “Have you finished yet?” In his typically unvarnished manner, George had presented a bleak but accurate view of the situation and again demonstrated that the NVN strength in South Vietnam was far stronger than had previously been reported by MACV, and that matériel and troop replacements were coming across the 17th parallel at somewhat greater levels than previously. He closed by saying in effect that not even the President could tell the American voters on one day that the United States planned to get out of Vietnam, and on the next day advise Ho Chi Minh that we will stick it out for twenty years. Why should anyone in North Vietnam believe it?

  With this, LBJ rose like a rousted pheasant and bolted from the room. By the time Johnson came charging back, George’s career expectations had faded away. The President, who was a foot and a half taller and a hundred pounds heavier than George, struck him a resounding clap on the back and caught his hand in an immense fist. Wrenching George’s arm up and down with a pumping motion that might have drawn oil from a dry Texas well, Johnson congratulated him on the briefing, and on his services to the country and its voters. As he released George, he said, “Anytime you want to talk to me, just pick up the phone and come on over.” It was a vintage LBJ performance.

  Lyndon Johnson must have considered March 1968 the most difficult month of his political career. The March 12 New Hampshire presidential primary set the stage. LBJ’s name was not on the ballot, but the understanding of the Democratic Party was that LBJ would carry the day as a write-in candidate without having to campaign. Johnson received 49 percent of the vote, a slim 7 percent more than Senator Eugene McCarthy, an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam. Four days later, Senator Robert Kennedy, long regarded by Johnson as his most dangerous political enemy, announced his candidacy for president. Conventional Beltway wisdom had it that Johnson had lost both the hawks and the doves—the hawks blamed him for not crushing North Vietnam; and the doves detested the war and held the President responsible for every ugly aspect of it.

  At a Tuesday lunch a few days after listening to Dean Acheson’s advice, President Johnson shoved the Pentagon briefing material to one side. He glanced around the table, making eye contact with each of us in turn. He then began slowly to explain that he was in the process of making up his mind about running for a second term. He had not yet decided, but if he were not going to run he would make the announcement at the close of his TV talk, scheduled for March 31. I was not taken entirely by surprise, but the President’s blunt announcement did shake me.

  Without having any specific data to cite, I can say that in the course of my many hours in the White House, I had formed the impression that the mounting frustrations of his job had begun to tire the man I had thought to be indefatigable. I also sensed a growing concern about his heart condition. Lady Bird was as always the good soldier, but I have no doubt she spoke her mind in private.

  In his March 31 TV talk, LBJ began with the announcement that he had ordered a partial suspension of bombing North Vietnam “in the hope that this action will lead to early talks.” He continued, “We are … substantially reducing the present level of hostilities … unilaterally and at once.” He then added that he did not believe he should “devote an hour or a day” of his time to “any partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office.” The President closed by stating that he would “not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

  Three days later, the government of North Vietnam indicated its willingness to contact U.S. representatives in Paris to begin peace talks.

  On April 4, Martin Luther King was murdered by an assassin with a high-powered rifle. Within hours violence had broken out in Washington—looting and arson raged in the black communities in the District of Columbia. Riots erupted in cities across the country, and as federal troops occupied the area around U Street a pall of black smoke obscured the sun in Washington and parts of Virginia and Maryland.

  I was still living at the Chevy Chase Club, just across the state line in Maryland. To get home after a meeting with the President, I had to pass through military checkpoints in place along the route from the White House. It is difficult now to balance the emotions roiled by the realization that a half million troops were at risk in Vietnam, a country that many Americans might have difficulty locating on a map; that a semblance of martial law was in effect in Washington; and carnage and arson had erupted across the country.

  In the days that followed, militant students took to the streets in this country, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. In Czechoslovakia, the Prague Spring, a peaceful rejection of the communist government, blossomed briefly until cut down by Red Army tanks. In May, Hanoi accepted LBJ’s offer and talks were undertaken in a CIA safe house in Paris. No significant progress was made, and when the NVN representatives refused to step away from their demand that we stop bombing—now clearly one of our most effective military means—the talks fizzled.

  A wide range of political campaigning brought unusual candidates forward—among them, Eugene McCarthy, who did not seem much interested in campaigning. When George Wallace, the racist governor of Alabama, chose General Curtis LeMay—whose utilitarian weapon of choice was the atomic bomb—as his running mate, the Washington Post christened the pair the “Bombsy Twins.” And after beating Gene McCarthy in the California primary, Robert Kennedy was murdered by a crazed Arab nationalist. Many thought that Bob, who appeared to have softened his attitude and broadened his political interests, might have won the Democratic nomination.

  As orchestrated by Mayor Richard Daley, who authorized his police force to shoot to “maim” or “kill” the young political demonstrators, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was all but upstaged by the violence outside the convention hall. Former vice president Nixon stepped back into national politics to win the Republican nomination on the first ballot. Nixon’s choice of Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew as his prospective vice president struck many observers as a bizarre lapse of judgment for anyone as politically shrewd as Nixon.

  And in Vietnam, the war raged on.

  Sometime before the Tet offensive, I was surprised to find Robert Komer seated at LBJ’s Tuesday luncheon table. Komer, a former CIA Near East analyst, had left CIA to join the National Security Council staff under President Kennedy. In March 1966, President Johnson had named him a special assistant on Vietnam matters. At the time, Komer was in charge of CORDS—in plain text, the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support Staff—and stationed in Saigon. I had hardly picked up my napkin before the President turned to me and said, “I’ve approved the replacement of Bob Komer in Saigon by William Colby of your Agency.” This was the first I had heard of this assignment and, to put it politely, I was irritated. Komer, who had a reputation for being impulsive, brash, and overly impressed with statistics of any sort, had not had the courtesy to let me know what he was planning to do, nor had Colby thought to mention it. In his book Colby notes that the appointment came as news to him.* This I must doubt. I’ve been around Washington too long to believe that a senior officer of one agency might be transferred across town to another agency, and offered the prospect of ambassadorial rank, without ever having been asked if he might so much as consider the proposition.

  At the time, I had slated Colby to take over our Soviet operations division. Aside from the SAVA (special assistant for Vietnamese affairs) post, the responsibility for Soviet operations was one of the most important job
s the Agency had to offer. I managed to muffle my irritation by reminding myself that in the President’s view, Vietnam came first in any calculation. Moreover, Colby had had considerable Vietnam experience.

  It is probably just as well that Colby was assigned to Saigon. His lack of understanding of counterintelligence, and his unwillingness to absorb its precepts, would not have been compatible with the Soviet responsibility, and would surely have put him at loggerheads with Jim Angleton, his staff, and a number of senior operations officers. It was after Colby was appointed director of Central Intelligence that he asked Angleton to resign.

  Colby’s transfer to CORDS meant that he had to request leave without pay from CIA and to be hired by the Agency for International Development (AID), an above-the-board government agency which was never part of CIA. Once in AID, Colby was assigned to CORDS. As much as this sounded like a CIA front, CORDS was nothing of the kind. It was a government-wide program established under AID, directed by AID personnel, staffed with a few State Department, U.S. Information Agency officers, and, in time, a seemingly ever-increasing number of CIA personnel.

  It was under CORDS direction that the PHOENIX program was initiated shortly after the Tet offensive. It became an important part of the ill-named pacification program. (Rather than an attempt to “pacify,” or even to quiet, the South Vietnamese countryside, PHOENIX was intended to activate and support armed resistance to the Viet Cong at every level from the most isolated hamlet to Saigon.) The program developed from earlier counterinsurgency efforts to arm and strengthen resistance to the Viet Cong terrorism.

  From the beginning of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, CIA attempted to combat and penetrate the North Vietnamese (NVN) secret organizations in South Vietnam. As a matter of convenience, we referred to all of the various clandestine NVN elements—guerrillas, terrorists, spies, Communist Party activists, and support personnel—as the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI). This involved our people working closely with the intelligence and counterinsurgency elements of MACV, the military command. Prisoners were interrogated, propaganda material monitored, and communications intercepted. We also maintained close liaison with the various South Vietnamese police, security, and intelligence organizations.

  The basic Viet Cong objective was to destroy the South Vietnamese government at every level. Village leaders were murdered, and local defense force members were tortured and put to death. At the hamlet and provincial level, civilians suspected of any anti-VCI activity or sympathies were murdered. In the effort to wreck the economy, communications were interrupted, bridges blown, rail lines sabotaged, and crops destroyed. Young men were herded from villages and forcibly enlisted in the Viet Cong. On the threat of death, informers were recruited throughout the area and their relatives forced to supply and to hide Viet Cong units. Before the Tet offensive, our estimate of the VCI strength stood at well over 70,000 members excluding the regular NVN armed forces also active in South Vietnam. The VCI was a formidable force, and as savage as any in this century.

  Like CORDS, PHOENIX was not a CIA program. It was a joint Vietnamese and AID program. As such, it played an important part in the efforts to eliminate Viet Cong guerrilla warfare in South Vietnam, and to harden the lines of communication and protect the population centers. PHOENIX had no forces of its own, and conducted no operations. It operated through the Vietnamese intelligence, security, police, and military organizations. Agency officers and lower-ranking Army personnel on detail to CIA served as liaison officers at various national, regional, provincial, and district offices manned and under the direction of the Vietnamese military, intelligence, and security personnel. Well-conceived efforts were made to recruit VCI personnel or encourage them to defect. Amnesty offers were well publicized and effective. Viet Cong agents were identified and their photographs circulated. Rewards were posted for the capture of VC personnel. Local defense teams were trained to the degree possible and well armed. As the Hanoi government was to admit sometime after the fall of Saigon, the early efforts of the PHOENIX program were successful, and of serious concern to the NVN leadership.

  In testifying before a congressional committee in 1971, Bill Colby cited statistics supporting the overall success of the PHOENIX program: “From 1968 to 1971 some 17,000 [VCI] activists had chosen amnesty, some 28,000 had been captured, and some 20,000 had been killed.” He then emphasized that “the vast percentage of these—over 85 percent—were killed in combat actions with Vietnamese and American military and paramilitary troops and only about 12 percent by police or other security forces.”* Given these statistics—some 65,000 Viet Cong activists were eliminated from the VCI in South Vietnam—it is not surprising that Hanoi was seriously worried about the initial impact of the PHOENIX program.

  The PHOENIX blueprint was a textbook plan for a counterinsurgency program, well tailored to the terrain. However, the program could not cope with the reality of the ineffective and lackadaisical Vietnamese government. As with many plans created to strengthen the government of South Vietnam (SVN), after initial spurts of energy, and with the marked exception of some individual leaders at the local level, the SVN bureaucracy’s attention would wander. As successful a program as PHOENIX was when guided by energetic local leaders, the effort could not develop into a national program without an equally dedicated and sustained level of support from Saigon. This was not often forthcoming, and in the longer run, the PHOENIX program failed.

  Ho Chi Minh and his advisors had from the beginning successfully corralled the anti-colonial emotion of many Vietnamese. The pervasive presence in South Vietnam of numbers of brash, self-confident Americans who had but scant understanding of the local culture and customs, and who—given their brief assignments in Vietnam—could make little effort to learn the language, gave the VCI propagandists a ready-made manifestation of yet another imperialist foreign power bent on exploiting Vietnam for colonial purposes. The widespread American assumption that the South Vietnamese were both anti-communist and pro-Saigon government was wrong. There was a measure of anti-communist conviction in the South, but modest enthusiasm for the Saigon leadership.

  Before it had run its course, PHOENIX had become one of the most controversial Vietnam programs. PHOENIX was directed and staffed by Vietnamese over whom the American advisors and liaison officers did not have command or direct supervision. The American staff did its best to eliminate the abuse of authority—the settling of personal scores, rewarding of friends, summary executions, prisoner mistreatment, false denunciations, illegal property seizure—that became the by-products of the PHOENIX counterinsurgency effort. In the blood-soaked atmosphere created by the Viet Cong terrorism, the notion that regulations and directives imposed by foreign liaison officers could be expected to curb revenge and profit-making was unrealistic. By 1971 and the introduction of President Nixon’s policy of gradually turning the war over to the government of South Vietnam, PHOENIX had fallen by the wayside.

  One of the problems in assessing the relative strength of the opposition forces in South Vietnam was what has become known as “quantification,” a practice that became a quest for tangible proof that we were winning. Among other criteria this involved keeping count of the bridges blown along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, factories crippled in the North, weapons captured, enemy wounded, and bodies counted. In the most favorable circumstances this sort of bookkeeping might be expected to lead to optimistic figures. In the atmosphere prevailing in Vietnam—a weak central government, all too dependent upon U.S. support at every level—it was too much to expect some of the Vietnamese to provide candid assessments of their activity. On the American side, such reckonings were also prejudiced by the tendency—unconsciously influenced by the level of logistical support commanded by U.S. forces—to assume that the NVN irregulars in South Vietnam required more logistic provisions than was the case.

  It was also difficult to comprehend the effectiveness of the Viet Cong supply channels, and to understand just how little it took for the VCI to make do. Bicycles la
den with two-hundred-pound burdens could be wheeled along jungle trails that no level of air attack could interdict for more than a few hours. And in combat situations it is unrealistic to assume that battle-stressed troops will spend much time determining whether firefight casualties were members of the VCI or unfortunate bystanders.

  In writing this, I came across a page of scribbled notes I had taken of a phone call from President Johnson to me late one afternoon in early March 1967 that seemed to catch his spirit and intense concentration on the war. I cannot say that the following is verbatim, but as a friend is fond of saying, it “near-as-damn-it” is.

  The President: “Dick, I want two or three studies made for me. I want Bob [McNamara] to do some things, and Walt [Rostow], too. I don’t ask for many studies from you, but with all these leaks about the bombing, I want you to get the best people you have, and assign a little task force to get me the following: the best estimate you have on how many people are pinned down by our bombing. They [presumably MACV] say 300,000 repairing railroads, bridges, and roads.… 100,000 coastal defense, maybe 125,000.… Second, I want to see how they have to travel at night because of the problem created by cleaning up in the day and all that kind of stuff.… I want twenty examples of what it costs them when we bomb.… I would like anything I can get on what the captured documents show, what the prisoners say about how many people they lost on their way down [from North Vietnam]. As I remember it, Walt said that a good many of the prisoners said they lost a third of their unit on their way down.”

  I forbore reminding LBJ that he averaged two requests a week for special studies, and said I would set up a task force and verify the estimated casualties along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  President: “I want to see what evidence there is that our bombing is causing them [the NVN government] to stay in the war longer.… All the doves say that our bombing just stiffens their resistance, like in World War II and the Nazis.… I don’t believe this, but if there’s evidence to show it, I want to see it.”