Night Fighter

by Hamilton, William H. ; Sasser, Charles W. ;

  At 9:00 a.m., President Kennedy received a message broadcast first from Radio Moscow. The word spread quickly from the White House to the State Department to the CIA in Langley to the Pentagon.

  “The Soviet Government … has issued a new order on the dismantling of the weapons which you describe as ‘offensive’ and their crating and return to the Soviet Union.”

  Khrushchev had blinked. Grozny and other ships bound for Cuba turned and headed back to the Soviet Union. JFK had partially redeemed himself for turning yellow at the Bay of Pigs.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ONE THING I LEARNED about the CIA during my involvement with spooks at the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis: the Agency was an important element in an increasingly complex panorama of “night fighters” operating largely unseen in an ongoing battle dedicated to victory without laying waste to the world in the process. DCI John McCone approached me several times about my switching over from the Navy to work for the CIA. I suspected my little mission to Amsterdam might actually have been a test and his doing.

  By this time I had been in the Navy for thirteen years, not counting Annapolis, and was up for promotion to full commander, with a captaincy virtually assured. I had an ex-wife and three kids I rarely saw, and a new wife and stepdaughter who liked the fact that I was mostly tied to a desk near home. We had even bought a house in the suburbs and moved out of the apartment. Could a poodle on a leash and PTA membership be far off?

  Mary was happy. I was miserable, dragging my briefcase to the office mornings during the eight o’clock rush like every other commuter. My SEALs were doing things; my ass was getting broad sitting at a desk.

  A month after the Cuban Crisis ended, on November 30, 1962, I signed off active naval duty without consulting my wife, reverted to the Navy Reserve, and signed on with the Central Intelligence Agency. I should have predicted Mary’s reaction.

  “You did what?”

  CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, was located about eight miles from downtown Washington, D.C. Its 258 secluded acres surrounded by residential streets resembled more a university campus than the brain center for U.S. worldwide intelligence services. Savillian Chapman, number two in the Maritime Division of the Special Operations Division, picked me up at home in a plain, unmarked Chevy sedan. He pulled off the George Washington Parkway and along a two-lane road that led to Spook Campus.

  Chapman was an ordinary-looking fella in his late forties, early fifties maybe, with a thatch of salt-and-pepper hair and a broad, open face that seemed inappropriate on a man in his line of business, snooping through other people’s secrets. He could have been a small businessman or owner/proprietor of a mom-and-pop grocery.

  As we drove he related a bit of CIA lore from the beginning days. Seemed President Harry Truman had a sense of humor. He convened a small, secret ceremony at the White House in 1946 to swear in Admiral Sidney Souers as the first DCI, presenting Souers with a black cloak, black hat, a wooden dagger, and dubbing him “Commander, The Cloak and Dagger Group of Snoopers.”

  The enormous main building of CIA headquarters rose almost unexpectedly out of the trees. Nearby in a separate building sat the Headquarters Auditorium, a free-standing, dome-shaped structure connected to the main building by an underground passage.

  Any resemblance Langley CIA might have had with the University of Virginia or even the Naval Academy ended at the guard shack. There were no students on campus beyond the entrance. Only undistinguished-looking men hurrying from place to place like automatons in a self-imposed hush.

  “It’s not as grim as it appears,” Chapman said with a smile, as though reading my mind. He stopped at the guard shack and rolled down his window to have our credentials checked. “You’ll get used to it, Bill.”

  The plainclothes security man bent down and looked through Chapman’s window at me on the passenger’s seat.

  “You’re new, sir?”

  “That’s right.”

  He studied my ID. “You never really get used to it, sir,” he said, having apparently overheard Chapman’s remark as we drove up.

  We parked in front of the main building and entered. The atmosphere of this strange place seemed to settle around us like still air, beginning with our echoing footfalls across the open lobby. A huge CIA seal was inlaid in the floor and a Biblical verse etched into the wall: And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. John VIII–XXXII.

  Chapman chuckled at the look on my face. “You already feel free, right? Come on. The director wants to see you.”

  We took the elevator.

  “The cold fact, Bill, is what the guard said. You never really get used to it. You learn never to fully trust anyone.”

  I had met DCI John McCone on several occasions in consultation on the use of naval special forces. It was after one of these meetings at the Pentagon that he tempted me with a serious offer of a position in the Agency. We got together several other times after that to further explore the offer.

  Most members of the CIA were either station-bound intelligence analysts or Foreign Intelligence (FI) officers who worked overseas, generally out of American embassies recruiting and handling local operatives. Spies. A smaller bunch with the CIA known as the Special Operations Division (SOD), the Agency’s least-known covert section, was responsible for taking care of most of the dirty work.

  SOD was composed of three sections: Ground Branch; Air Branch; and Maritime Branch. Maritime consisted primarily of former SEALs and UDTs. Its primary emphasis centered on amphibious or waterborne ops along hostile shorelines. Various other divisions within the Agency could draw trained personnel from the SOD to form Special Operations Groups (SOGs) to carry out paramilitary operations such as sabotage, personnel or materiel recovery, prisoner snatches, raids, hostage rescues, and other low-profile activities. These men were commonly known as “knuckle draggers.” Tough, resilient men like Rip Robertson and Grayston Lynch.

  Ed Foster, the number one at Maritime, was dying from liver cancer. I had met him before. He looked much older than his years—like a frail old man with thin hair and yellow shoes.

  Chapman was Maritime’s number two below Foster. Number three was a man I had not yet met. The DCI offered me Maritime number three when Foster died and everyone moved up in the hierarchy.

  The DCI rose and extended a handshake when his secretary showed Chap and me into his office. On a wall hung a portrait of President Harry Truman, the man who gave life to the CIA. On the other wall hung a picture of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. On his desk perched a family snapshot of the DCI and a pretty, slender woman surrounded by what I took to be adult children and preteen grandchildren.

  McCone was a broad-shouldered, trim man with big hands and short, white hair. As always, he appeared businesslike in a dark suit and red power tie. I thought he bore a striking resemblance to former president Woodrow Wilson. Or, rather, to the professor Wilson had once been.

  He got right to the point of outlining my duties: Responsible for concept and development of plans; selection and training of personnel; selection, procurement and readiness of equipment and staff; and direct supervision of worldwide field activities.

  My ass was about to slim down.

  “Welcome aboard, Commander,” Director McCone concluded. “Chap here will fill you in on the details of what we have going and get you ready to stand on line. Things are happening fast all over the world. The president expects us to be ready. You’ll be responsible for three major geographical areas—Cuba; the Belgian Congo; and Vietnam.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE UNITED STATES HAD carried out intelligence activities since the days of George Washington, but only since World War II had it been coordinated on a government-wide basis. The unforeseen attack on Pearl Harbor prompted the creation of a clearing house for foreign policy intelligence analysis. It was only later that a requirement for spying and covert action was imposed.

  The first public mention of “Central Intelligence
Agency” occurred in the U.S. Senate Military Affairs Committee at the end of 1945 in a proposal advocating a National Intelligence Authority. By this time the OSS and other covert and intelligence gathering organizations were abolished. The military, the U.S. State Department, and the FBI all opposed the idea of a central intelligence, for various reasons having to do with self-interest.

  Nonetheless, President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act into law on July 26, 1947, to create the National Security Council (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency. A subsequent act in 1949, the CIA Act, allowed the agency to function in secrecy with only nominal oversight.

  Different demands were placed on the new agency. Truman wanted a centralized entity to organize and supply information to the presidency; the Department of Defense insisted on military intelligence and covert action; the State Department wanted to meddle politically in foreign affairs. That brought about two areas of CIA responsibility—covert action and covert intelligence.

  The Agency’s early track record proved abysmal. Not only did it fail to foresee important international challenges, such as the Soviet takeover of Romania and Czechoslovakia or the Soviet blockade of Berlin, but foreign double agents made mockery of new and untried operatives.

  By the time of the Bay of Pigs, however, the Agency’s record had improved along with its covert experience. It recruited Lieutenant Roy Boehm for one of its covert actions. Spies uncovered a plot by an international assassin headquartered in the Dominican Republic to murder a Cuban operative working with the CIA in Havana. Under the Agency’s auspices, Boehm flew into Santo Domingo posing as an advisor to Dominican UDTs. His real mission was to kill the would-be assassin, who went by the name “Manuel.”

  An undercover double agent known as “Raul” told “Manuel” that Boehm was an international arms dealer working out of Saudi Arabia. During a private meeting to discuss arms shipments, Boehm shot the man through the head with a 9mm German Luger. He looked at the dead man, turned, and walked out.

  “I realized that spying, dirty tricks, and political killings were all part of the new unconventional warfare scenario,” Boehm told me later. “This Cold War shit, skipper, it’s getting brutal. It ain’t for the weak-hearted. It’s fuck ’em all and count the bodies.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  DURING THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR of 1898, Secretary of State John Hay wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, “It has been a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that fortune which loves the brave.”

  Change the time and location and you had Vietnam, at least in the beginning.

  The first thing that struck me about Vietnam, when I grabbed my carry-on and got off the plane at Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon, was the incredible heat. Like opening the door of Mom’s old kerosene stove oven back when I was a kid and we were stationed in Panama. The second thing that struck me was the sight and stench of a dead water buffalo alongside the tarmac and the cloud of black flies hovering on it.

  I wore light tropical worsted slacks and a shirt loose over my belt for air circulation. Sweat rings appeared underneath my arms by the time I walked across the tarmac to the terminal. Most of the other passengers hurrying along with me were a mixture of Asian and European businessmen in hats, shirts, and loosened ties. None appeared especially pleased with their destination—or perhaps it was just the heat.

  I found my luggage—I always traveled light—and left the terminal to check on a ride. John “Jocko” Richardson, CIA Chief of Station in Saigon, was supposed to pick me up at the airport. He must have gotten held up. I dropped my bag and fired up a cigarette while I took a look around. This was my first trip to Vietnam.

  Not much to see from here. The shimmering of heat and a hint of city beyond the taxi and rickshaw parking area where rowdy operators vied to capture travelers to deliver to their destinations. At this early period, Vietnam was predominately a CIA commitment. Had been, in fact, since as early as 1950 when President Truman resolved to help the French retain their hold over Indochina and prevent the Communist Chinese expansion into Southeast Asia.

  Look at this shitbag little country. Divided at the waist, the North a pissant state bordering on China, the southern half struggling to establish democracy while striving to keep communist guerrillas from absorbing the rural countryside.

  William Colby served as CIA chief of station in Saigon from 1959 until recently in 1962, when he was promoted to chief of the CIA’s Far East Division and head of the Agency’s Civil Operations and Rural Development efforts. Now forty-three years old, he was a mild-appearing man, studious-looking, wearing rimmed glasses with his thinning hair swept back from a broad forehead. His nose and lips were narrow and his ears large and seemingly out of place.

  “Quite frankly,” he had said during an extended session with DCI McCone, SecDef Robert McNamara, and several other military, State, and Agency personnel, of which I was one, “I don’t feel there is much chance of generating any real resistance in North Vietnam against Ho Chi Minh, and I’m not sure South Vietnam can survive without substantial involvement of the United States. I don’t think the American people are ready for another Korea.”

  McNamara, a ruddy, broad-faced man wearing spectacles, looked stricken, as though the statement was a traitor’s knife stuck into his back. “The president will disagree with you,” he snapped.

  Since President Kennedy’s speech that opened the hatch for the creation of Navy SEALs nearly two years ago, and since his failure to act during the Bay of Pigs, he had become the nation’s foremost advocate of counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare. He referred to the Cold War as a “long twilight struggle leading to a new kind of war—revolution, people’s wars, subterranean wars, multidimensional war, slow-burn war, war in the shadows [that required] a new kind of fighting force.”

  South Vietnam had no chance on its own. Special warfare strategies and tactics in countering the North’s continuing guerrilla incursions were the little nation’s only hope of becoming a democracy free of communist domination.

  “Sir—?” I ventured.

  Colby and McNamara looked at me.

  “President Kennedy is right,” I said. “Special operations forces from the Navy and Army can make the difference—if they’re used correctly.”

  McNamara lifted an eyebrow to offset his lenses. “You think you can use them correctly, commander?”

  “They’re an answer to Vietnam.”

  I hoped I wasn’t letting my alligator mouth overload my hummingbird ass.

  Green Berets were already in country, twelve teams of them training South Vietnamese troops, with another twelve currently preparing for overseas deployment. SEALs worked with the CIA along sea and river fronts, the first SEAL detachment of two officers and ten enlisted from Dave Del Guidice’s SEAL Team One having arrived in Da Nang earlier in the year to operate a secret military project called OP-34.

  OP-34 was the reason I came to Vietnam. I much preferred getting in on the action and not leaving the hazardous stuff just to the lower ranks.

  I spotted Jocko Richardson driving onto the Saigon airport in a blue Toyota with another man. He waved and stopped.

  “Hamilton?”

  I nodded. “Richardson?”

  I tossed my bag and carry-on onto the backseat and scooted in after them. The man in the front passenger’s seat turned to shake hands with me and introduce himself as Averell Harriman. I knew the name and position: ambassador-at-large in Vietnam and undersecretary of state for political affairs.

  They drove me to the Majestic Hotel. I dropped my luggage off in my room on the fourth floor. It was typical of tropical Asia—high ceiling with a fan to stir up a breeze and disperse mosquitoes, two rattan chairs, monsoon mildew creeping up plastered walls that were no longer whitewashed every dry season. The three of us proceeded to the roof patio, where we had drinks in the shade of a striped awning.

  Jocko was an ordinary-looking man
of about fifty, medium height and build. I liked his sincere and open manner right away.

  Harriman was beginning to age, was in fact around seventy, but his hair had not yet turned completely white and he still walked with a steady gait. His eyes were of a strange hue and piercing, his mouth thin and wide, and his nose like the predatory beak of a raptor bird.

  Colby had briefed me on both men before I left Langley. He thought Jocko could be trusted implicitly. He sounded less than certain about Harriman. Two years ago, Anatoliy Golitsyn had defected from the Russian secret police and denounced Harriman as being a spy for the Soviets. The CIA investigated and dismissed the accusation as unfounded.

  Drinks on the roof were a pleasant experience after the long, tiring flight across California to Hawaii and Japan and then over Korea to Saigon. Relaxing, I leaned back in the shade of the awning in a new wicker chair and gazed off toward the brown Saigon River swarming with sampans and junks. Apparently, whole families lived on the boats with their chickens, geese, and hogs.

  The conversation proceeded light and general. It seemed to me that Jocko was deliberately guiding it that way. That aroused my curiosity. When Harriman got up to go downstairs to check for dispatches, I took advantage of his absence. I offered Jocko a cigarette and lit it for him. I decided blunt was the best approach.

  “You don’t like that old man,” I said.

  He looked at me. “Like has nothing to do with it.”

  He tried to shrug it off. But then he turned in his chair to look out and down toward the river.

  “President Kennedy,” he began thoughtfully, “appointed Averell to Vietnam as ambassador-at-large. Fred Nolting might be ambassador here, but it’s Harriman who calls the shots. He makes decisions without consulting the ambassador, the attorney general, or the president.”