John McCone telephoned me at home with the news. It was still dark outside; I had returned from China Beach less than twelve hours ago. Mary stirred in bed when the phone rang, then turned her back to me while I talked to the DCI. I hung up the phone and laid a hand on Mary’s back.
“I have to go to work,” I said.
She moved away from my hand and pretended to be asleep.
In the Gulf of Tonkin, three North Vietnamese P-4 torpedo boats had approached within five nautical miles of Maddox and released their torpedoes. Maddox evaded and returned fire with five-inch shells, scoring a direct hit on one of the P-4s.
Carrier USS Ticonderoga launched four F-8 Crusader jets that sank one of the two remaining boats and damaged the third as they retreated. Maddox suffered a single KPV heavy machine gun round through the destroyer’s superstructure.
For the next week I watched history unfold either from Langley or Pentagon conference tanks while diplomats were hard at it on both sides of the ocean to either defend, justify, or neutralize actions undertaken by their respective nations.
In North Vietnam, General Phuong Tai accused Maddox of attacking peaceful fishing boats, thus compelling the honorable North Vietnam Navy to fight back. In Washington, President Johnson and SecDef Robert McNamara portrayed the engagement as an unprovoked attack in international waters.
There was a lot of scurrying about all day August 3 at the Pentagon, as well as at State and the White House. Every conference room was full. Coffee pots emptied as fast as they were filled. I must have guzzled five gallons myself.
That night off Vietnam, Maddox paired with another destroyer, the USS Turner Joy, to resume patrol off the North Vietnamese coast, beyond the international three-mile line but inside the twelve miles North Vietnam claimed. Three China Beach Nasties with 57mm recoilless rifles also raided two separate NVA coastal installations.
North Vietnam fired back on the Nasties and filled the Gulf of Tonkin with Swatow patrol boats.
Things were not going to be allowed to die down, not with these kinds of “mine is bigger than yours” posturing from both sides. I suspected President Johnson would push this to the limit. From what I heard, and what I saw, the president was itching for a fight.
Daniel Ellsberg, special assistant to SecDef McNamara, was on Pentagon duty the night of August 4, when he received an emergency incoming radio message from the Gulf of Tonkin. At 11:00 p.m., USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy were patrolling the Gulf as a two-destroyer task force under the command of Captain John J. Herrick when their radar and sonar indicated another attack by the North Vietnamese Navy.
Rough weather and heavy seas on top of a night turned black by low cloud cover added confusion to the situation. For four hours, firing repeatedly against what their captains described as torpedo attacks, the two U.S. destroyers maneuvered amid electronic and visual reports of enemy watercraft. No wreckage or bodies were ever recovered from the contact despite the Navy’s claim of sinking two torpedo boats.
I accompanied John McCone to the Pentagon where SecDef McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, NSA’s McGeorge Bundy, and a number of others were crowded into the communications center with Ellsberg. It was 6:00 p.m. Washington time. Tension seemed to cast off sparks as Captain Herrick’s cables kept coming in at intervals. McNamara remained constantly on the horn relaying them to President Johnson at the White House. I could almost imagine LBJ grabbing the Soviet premier by his ears, as he famously did hound dog pups, and barking out something like, “You shithead, this is between me and that yellow sonofabitch in Hanoi—so stay out of it!”
Shortly before midnight local, the president interrupted national television to make his announcement.
“My fellow Americans: As president and commander-in-chief, it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply. … That reply is being given as I speak to you tonight. Air action is now in execution against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam which have been used in these hostile operations…
“Finally, I have today met with the leaders of both parties of the Congress of the United States to pass a resolution making it clear that our Government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in Southeast Asia.…”
Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7 by a unanimous vote in the House and only two nays in the Senate. The Resolution authorized the president to “take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of freedom.”
It was the equivalent of a declaration of war and provided a legal basis for massive American investment. McCone’s first reaction echoed mine: “Oh, shit! This thing has spun out of control.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I LOOKED AT DCI JOHN McCone over our morning coffee together in his top floor office at Langley as the conversation shifted to Africa. My initial reaction was: Sounds like a job for Humphrey Bogart and the African Queen.
The communist bloc was at it again, poking and probing at the Third World, taking advantage of the escalation in Vietnam and our focus there to slip in something sneaky elsewhere to instigate insurrection. Sometimes I thought World War II had never ended, had in fact merely shifted into the shadows.
In 1963, a rebel army known as the Simba Rebellion had captured much of northern and eastern Congo, including Stanleyville, more than a thousand miles up the Congo River from the Atlantic seacoast, which they declared to be the capital of a new “Peoples’ Republic of The Congo.” When the central government in Leopoldville made moves in 1964 to drive out revolutionaries and reconsolidate the nation, Simbas rounded up hundreds of Belgians, Americans, and other Europeans, surrounded them with drums full of gasoline in the lobby of the Victoria Hotel, and threatened to burn them alive if government forces intervened. These hostages had now been held under threat for nearly four months.
“Bone,” McCone asked, “can you take boats up the Congo to Stanleyville and get these folks out? We have to act fast. These Simbas are savages. They aren’t bluffing.”
Belgium had ruled the huge territory of the Congo for more than half a century before granting it independence in 1960. Violence erupted when the two provinces of Katanga and South Kasai seceded. UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld sent in UN peacekeeping forces.
Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Central Congolese Government welcomed the UN at first but then turned against it when Hammarskjöld refused to aid him in driving out the secessionists and reuniting the Congo. He turned to the communist bloc instead. Russia, China, and Cuba poured in advisors and equipment.
“If we can take the Congo,” China’s premier commented, “we will have the whole of Africa.”
Supported by the USSR, Lumumba and two thousand troops marched against South Kasai to get rid of Albert Kalonji, who had declared himself president. The ill-disciplined Congolese Army slaughtered more than 3,500 civilians. Thousands of others fled.
Although Lumumba succeeded in forcing Katanga and Kasai back into the fold, Congolese President Joseph Kasa-Vubu used the Kasai massacres as a pretext to get rid of Lumumba, who was becoming a powerful rival. Lumumba was arrested and subsequently executed, an action that provoked international outrage among communists and their sympathizers worldwide. Protestors attacked the Belgian embassy in Yugoslavia. Violent demonstrations erupted in London and New York.
A politician named Joseph Mobutu acquired sufficient power in the Congo to replace Kasa-Vubu with a college of commissioners; Moise Tshombe, who led the secessionist movement in Katanga, joined him to head an interim Congo administration while fresh elections were organized. Mobutu and Tshombe threw out the Soviets and returned to the UN for help.
Communists w
ere not yet finished with African aspirations. Political instability they helped create coincided in 1963 with the widening escalation of the Cold War. In an orgy of savagery and bloodshed, the Maoist-inspired Simba Rebellion executed thousands of government officials, political leaders of opposition parties, provincial and local police, schoolteachers, and those they believed to have become “Westernized.”
Simbas, meaning “lions” in Swahili, consisted mostly of an irregular militia of teenagers under the influence of a drug called khat. They were indoctrinated in witchcraft and juju and promised that bullets would turn to water if the Simbas first drank magic water and screamed a magic cry, “Mai Mulele!” America, they were told in a standard communist ploy, was the enemy.
Khrushchev sent in at least two hundred military advisors to train the Simbas. Castro dispatched one hundred Cubans under the command of an old nemesis of the United States, Che Guevara.
As far back as the Eisenhower administration, the United States feared a Soviet-aligned Congo could form the foundation for a major expansion of communism into Africa. DCI McCone pressed President Johnson to increase military aid to Mobutu and Tshombe.
“We give in to commies in Africa, we give in to others in Cuba and Vietnam—pretty soon we’ll be giving in to them in Washington,” he said.
Agents in the CIA’s important outpost at Leopoldville stressed how the Congo “is experiencing a classic communist takeover” and might follow the same path as Cuba. However, President Johnson seemed too busy ramping up a war in Vietnam to pay much attention to Africa.
McCone’s suggestion that I rescue the hostages at Stanleyville by running a fleet of boats hauling an armed force a thousand miles up the Congo River sounded unworkable to the point of delusion. After studying the situation, I concluded we had two other options to reach the Victoria Hotel in time to save the hostages—overland or by air.
Stanleyville was surrounded by a vast jungle with few roads. That left one practical option.
I reported my conclusion on Stanleyville to the DCI: “The hostages’ lives depend on surprise and speed. The only way we can do it is by airborne troops. My SEALs can do it. Give us the chance. They’re all airborne qualified—and they’re the best in the world.”
McCone nodded thoughtfully.
“I’ll try it up the Congo River if that’s the decision,” I amended. “But the Simbas will slaughter those people in Stanleyville before we can get to them.”
“There’s one obstacle to the airborne option,” the DCI pointed out. “The American military cannot be perceived as directly involved.”
The Belgians operated under no such restrictions. McCone managed to squeeze C-130 airplanes out of President Johnson for use by the Belgians in a rescue attempt.
At 6:00 a.m. on November 24, 1964, Operation Dragon Rouge kicked off with 350 Belgian paratroopers commanded by Colonel Charles Laurent dropping onto Simi-Simi Airport on the western outskirts of the city, two miles from the Victoria Hotel. Simba rebels began massacring their captives. Panicked hostages broke out of the hotel and scattered with Simbas chasing after them, killing and mutilating in increasing fury as paras rushed down the main street toward the center of town. The Simbas slaughtered about two hundred foreigners before they dispersed, with rescuers chasing them. The death count may have been much higher but for the speed and surprise with which the paras arrived and executed the operation.
Over the next two days, Belgian soldiers, the Congolese National Army (ANC), and a contingent of mercenaries hired by ANC rescued more than 1,800 American and European hostages and 400 Congolese from Stanleyville and nearby Paulis.
At Langley, I watched with relief as events played out better than I expected.
“It’s not over.” DCI McCone said. “I have another assignment for you, Bone. You may have to go to the Congo after all.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I LOOKED OUT OVER THE African terrain from the cockpit of the C-130 Hercules as the pilots made final approach to the four-thousand-foot unsurfaced airstrip on the west shore of Lake Tanganyika near Albertville. I leaned forward in anticipation from my jump seat between the pilots. “Congo Joe” in the right seat turned his head and grinned at me.
“Welcome to the black heart of Africa,” he said.
“Heart of Darkness,” I responded. The novella by Joseph Conrad: “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. … I should be loyal to the nightmare of choice.” Africa as the “Dark Continent,” a place of danger and nightmares, was the accepted popular perception of darkest Africa at the turn of the century when Conrad published his book. In many ways, the image lingered on.
Tanganyika was the longest and second-largest freshwater lake in the world, stretching 418 miles to separate the nations of Congo and Tanganyika. It was beautiful country with the narrow deep blue of the lake snugged into the remarkable emerald of forest. Albertville further down the lake presented a contrasting conglomerate of dusty mortar buildings and native thatched huts bisected by dusty roads.
The lake had 1,136 miles of shoreline and an average width of only thirty miles, and smugglers were able quickly to ferry across Soviet- and Chinese-supplied arms to be used in ground fighting by Simbas against the Congolese National Army and its Belgian and mercenary allies. The rebels’ rout at Stanleyville had not stopped them.
Acting on Khrushchev’s instructions, Castro sent in a small fleet of armed and armored high-performance boats under Defense Minister Che Guevara to dominate the lake and keep supply lines to the Simbas open. Lacking a naval capability to interdict smugglers, Congolese president Moise Tshombe appealed to President Johnson, who promised to send help.
DCI McCone passed the issue on to me. “You’re our maritime expert. How do we handle it? How do we put a navy in there?”
I had helped design Swift Boats now being used on Vietnam’s waterways. “We’ll fly them in,” I said.
Mickey Kappes in my Maritime Division was in many ways a look-alike for Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s assassin, and a man who always seemed involved in some controversy or other, such as plots to knock off Fidel Castro. I sent him to Africa as a sort of advance party to pave the way and work with mercenaries to run down Che Guevara.
Out of sheer desperation when the Simba Rebellion first began, Tshombe and Mobutu in the Central Congolese Government had called up many former mercenaries to fight the revolutionaries. More than two hundred international hired fighters arrived in September 1964 to form a unit called 5 Commando led by “Mad Mike” Hoare to serve as the spearhead of the ANC. A more appalling horde could not have been assembled, gathered as they were from waterfront bars, jails, and back streets all over Europe. Thugs and brawlers, thieves, pickpockets, and muggers—just the sort to take on the killers and thugs of communism. They were widely feared all over the Congo for unsanctioned killings, torture of prisoners, looting, and mass rape in recaptured rebel areas.
“Suit your tactics to the enemy,” was Hoare’s philosophy on unconventional warfare. “Queensberry Rules when you are fighting gentlemen; no-holds-barred when you are up against savages. They do not think any more of you if you use kid gloves and soft talk. Less, as a matter of fact, as such are the traditional signs of weakness in Africa.”
UW could be a dirty business.
From CIA’s Miami Station, I collected sixteen Cuban exile boatmen. I brought in two SEALs from Vietnam with Swift experience, Lieutenants Phil Holtz and J. Hawes. They would be my officer staff. That made us a band of twenty, counting Kappes, who had already gone ahead, plus a half-dozen self-described “coon ass” workers from the Louisiana boat factory.
We had to disassemble the Swift Boats to transport them by airplanes. That meant splitting the hulls of the two 50-foot boats down the middle, snipping seven feet off the bows, cutting off the superstructure, and removing the engines. My Swift Boat force along with workers from the factory, equipment, supplies, and logistics—everything needed to reassemble the boats—were loaded aboard two C-130s
and four C-134 cargo planes and airlifted by way of Naples and Cairo to Lake Tanganyika.
Kappes was waiting at the airfield when I landed in the advance C-130. The other planes would be coming in at staggered intervals. After the heat and humidity of Vietnam, I was surprised to find, due to elevation, a temperate climate more like that of the Mediterranean than Equatorial Africa. Average temperatures ranged in the mid-seventies. No wonder European colonists settled in the area. This land could be a paradise with a proper government and the right approach to building a society.
The rest of the planes arrived the next afternoon and dumped fifty tons of boats in pieces by the side of the airstrip. Railcars on a narrow-gauge rail spur delivered the boat parts to a makeshift “marina” on the lake. The Cajun workers, using Argon-gas welders, began putting Humpty together again. Lieutenant Hawes and some of the Cubans set up armed watches to either side of the marina. I stood by the water and looked out over the lake.
“Boss, we got company,” Lieutenant Hawes yelled out suddenly from on top of a felled log.
A speck on the watery horizon approached fast. Lieutenant Holtz came up, pulling his ball cap low over his eyes. “Reception,” he guessed. “Might be the bad guys.”
It hadn’t taken long for word of the new American presence to spread across the lake to communist operating bases in Tanganyika.
“We can give ’em a surprise reception of our own,” Lieutenant Holtz suggested. He was in his early thirties, with a thick chest, muscled swimmer’s arms, and a tanned face topped by a sun-bleached crew cut. He carried an M-60 machine gun over his shoulder. “I’ll signal the Cubans to get ready.”
I recognized the boat as a Soviet Komar.
“He’s turning back,” I said.
The enemy boat kicked up a wake in a kind of salute as it swerved past. It continued up-lake. I noticed a red flag popping at the bow.
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