Play the Red Queen

by Juris Jurjevics

  “And did you ever have occasion to meet with General Nguyen Van Lang?”

  “Never had the pleasure, but we certainly became aware of him as we proceeded.”

  “He had something to do with the National Bank,” I said.

  Tuttle snorted like I’d made a joke. “Yeah, a little something.”

  “And with the Commodity Import Program.”

  “Ah, yes,” Tuttle said with disdain. “C-I-P. Jim said it stood for Corrupt Indochinese Pissants.”

  “Which particular pissants?”

  “General Lang for one, and nearly all the elite South Vietnamese we dealt with in the Economic Directorate. Plus plenty of others we never laid eyes on—high up in the regime and out of sight. Clever, cunning, crooked as snakes. Venal shits getting rich from the program and the scams they spun off it.”

  “Whoa,” Robeson said. “Back up if you will, please. CIP—what the hell is it exactly?”

  “A program of US-supported import subsidies.”

  “Like the Marshall Plan,” I volunteered, parroting what Robeson had said.

  “Pretty much,” Tuttle agreed. “The program kicked off right after Diem came to power eight years ago and has been running full-out ever since. Until one day Lodge shut it down without a word of warning to the Vietnamese. Just turned off the taps and let the realization of what that meant sink in.”

  “What does—did—CIP do?”

  “Congress wanted to encourage the Vietnamese to import machinery for factories and farming, like we did with Europe. The idea was to help the Viets grow their manufacturing and consumer industries, improve their agriculture—like that. Build up their economy, give them a taste of free-market prosperity that would make their citizens look favorably upon the Diem government for bringing them luxuries they’d never had.”

  “Sounds like a good deal,” Robeson said. “Must’ve made the civilians stateside happy too, to have a new market for their John Deeres and orange cheese.”

  “The surplus cheese, yeah. It was a condition they take the fucking cheese. Tractors, no. Turns out the Vietnamese didn’t want tractors. Didn’t want manufacturing equipment either. Just consumer goods. Water skis and record players. Bring ’em in and sell ’em, fast. In all the years CIP’s been running, they’ve never produced much of anything. The more they import, the weaker the economy gets.”

  “Ass-backwards,” I said. “How does this CIP thing actually work—when it’s running?”

  “Once Jim rubber-stamped the purchases, USAID transferred the dollar cost of the commodity into a special bank account at the National Bank of Viet Nam—administered by guess who.”

  “Uncle Lang again.”

  “Bingo. Whoever holds the license to import the desired commodity has the right to buy American dollar credits from the special account at a huge discount, use that money at face value to purchase the commodity overseas, then import it to Viet Nam and sell it.”

  “So the American manufacturers are happy,” Robeson said.

  “Sure. They’re getting paid full market price.”

  “How much of a discount do the licensees get on those dollars?” I said.

  “The importer gets each buck for, like, twenty-five cents.”

  “Two bits on the dollar,” I said, thunderstruck. My mind reeled with the local investments I could make if my pay packet was juiced by their discount subsidy.

  “So you can see where the licenses are an extremely valuable commodity,” Tuttle said, with a wan smile.

  “Licenses to breed money,” I said.

  Tuttle nodded. “So of course the licensees are happy to show their gratitude with gifts to Diem’s clan. Each month the palace handpicks a fortunate two thousand from a huge pool of applicants, all of them bearing gifts, naturally. The favored few come away with the licenses.”

  “Bearing gifts, you mean they buy these licenses?” Robeson said.

  “More like bid on them, but yeah, amounts to the same thing. Gold, cash, gems. Or contributions to Nhu’s semi-secret political party, for which General Nguyen Van Lang also happened to serve as treasurer. Lang had his fingers deep in government cash and the Diem clan’s personal funds—which can often seem interchangeable.”

  “Small world,” Robeson said. “So for the right price, the palace issues a license, say, for importing shoes, or air conditioners or whatever.”

  “And then the licenses make the importers rich without even trying,” I said. “They’re like a guarantee of double and triple profits.”

  “Exactly,” Tuttle said, loosening up. He lit a fresh cigarette from the end of the one he was already smoking. “You military guys”—he puffed—“you get your super-duper special rate of exchange on your pay. Higher than the phony official rate, but nothing like full value. Our government has you personally subsidizing the Vietnamese economy without ever asking you.” Tuttle looked back and forth between me and Robeson. “Which is why I’m guessing you take your pay packets to the Indian moneychangers.”

  He was polite; he hadn’t added “illegally.”

  “You got that right,” I said, thinking being up-front with him might help us.

  “They usually give us a hundred and forty piasters to the dollar, max,” Robeson added, following my lead. “Last month we made out like bandits. Just about doubled our money. Got one hundred ninety P for our greenbacks.”

  “Sure,” Tuttle said. “The dollar is a hot commodity right now. Everybody wants money that won’t wobble or crash if—more likely when—the Diem government goes down. Still, keeping the piaster pegged at a make-believe rate penalizes in-country personnel and costs US taxpayers, all the while making a shitload of Vietnamese importers damned well-off.”

  Robeson said, “They’re makin’ a friggin’ windfall from every fan and hair dryer.”

  Tuttle nodded. “The profit margins are spectacular. But even so they’re always asking, ‘How can I exploit this further?’ They tease out even more by diverting goods to the black market.” Tuttle unzipped a new red-and-white pack of Marlboros and resumed fumigating the room. His voice dropped to a whisper. “LaValle told us the US Army is sitting on its own nasty reports. Like one that says nine out of ten captured enemy rifles are American, distributed to ARVN but found on dead and captured Viet Cong fighters. Yet strangely there’s a chronic shortage of weapons among the village militias. The South Vietnamese like to pretend the arms intended for the militias are just misplaced somewhere in the logistical shambles. They’re not about to own up to where they really ended up—or how they got there.”

  “Black market,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Bought, stolen, captured,” he said. “Take your pick. I mean, think about it. Only a tenth of VC arms come from the Communist bloc. Their mortars, explosives, field dressings, grenades? Ours.”

  He poured himself a shot and knocked it back.

  “Sounds like we’re running a supply line for all comers, friend and foe alike,” I said.

  “It gets worse. Diem’s own officers sell ammunition to nearby Communist forces. You’re never going to hear, ‘Thank you for the bullets. Now we can go fight Communism for you.’ They’re too busy thinking, ‘I could sell these bullets across the border, and I don’t want to know who’s buying.’”

  “American bullets shot from American guns at American advisors.”

  Tuttle seemed to find my discomfort funny. “Diem’s hard-ass brother, Can, the one who rules Hue like a dictator, he’s selling rice to VC and the North.”

  “Diem’s own brother is trading with the enemy?”

  “When it comes to business, friend or enemy doesn’t matter,” Tuttle said.

  “How do the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese come by enough cash to buy our mortars and Brother Can’s rice?” Robeson asked.

  “From their Russian comrades and the Chinese, I suppose. Plus, the VC collect
tolls on all the trucking routes, of course. The shippers buy a window of immunity—maybe four hours—to drive the fifty miles from, say, Saigon to the Cambodian border unmolested. If you’ve paid up, the VC may take a few sacks or crates of what you’re hauling, but that’s all.”

  “And if you don’t buy immunity?”

  “The guerillas take whatever you’ve got on board. One way or another, everybody contributes to the VC cause. Vietnamese are notorious for not paying their taxes, but they all pay their ‘love donations’ to the VC, believe me. From little mom-and-pop shops right up to the big international corporations. Just the cost of doing business.”

  “Corporations? They pay cash?”

  “Naturally. Can’t have cancelled checks payable to Viet Cong fronts. If you run a coffee or tea plantation in the highlands, or a rubber plantation near Saigon, you slip the Viet Cong collector a cool million and your rubber trees are safe as gas pumps for another year.”

  “Gas pumps? You mean Western petroleum outfits pay the VC?”

  “Damn right. Huge oil companies like Dutch Shell can’t afford to have their tanker trucks or gas stations torched, or that huge depot downriver at Nha Be touched off. What’s a million bucks to them? Petty cash. First of every month, the executives look away while a Vietnamese manager passes along the gratitude. No lousy piasters either. Strictly Swiss francs, US dollars, British pounds sterling.”

  “How much are these love donations?”

  “Do the math. The monthly installment on a million dollars has gotta be eighty, eighty-five thou.”

  My brain was going ka-ching.

  “Dream on.” Tuttle read me right. “You don’t want to fuck with these people. Diem and Nhu, Ho and the VC—you don’t wanna get between any of these parties and their piggy banks . . . or their destiny. Mess with their little arrangements and you’ll be doing the backstroke in a canal with your feet chained together and your wrists wrapped in barbed wire.”

  Tuttle slumped back into the couch. “The boys around the trough aren’t exactly civil. The palace in particular isn’t gentle about reprimanding deadbeats. Any fool who fails to remunerate the Ngo clan for his import privileges gets his goods repossessed and his ass thrown in jail. If Nhu is feeling generous or the guy’s a relative his commodities might just get sold off. If not, it’s goodnight, Irene.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Tuttle chewed a couple of aspirin, swigged some whiskey and took a deep drag on his cigarette while he weighed whether to say more. But we didn’t have to push. He had a lot pent up. He was afraid but he was also angry as hell.

  “CIP was supposed to do good,” he said. “Supposed to fund the Vietnamese government, finance the military and police forces and civil service. The piasters the importers pay to buy the discounted dollars, they go right into the government’s treasury account.”

  “At General Lang’s National Bank,” I said.

  “Natch. Those piasters are the country’s currency reserve. Hard to run a government—much less fight a war—if all you have are ridiculously low taxes you can’t collect because the South Vietnamese won’t pay. Millions of citizens, and maybe a few thousand shell out any taxes. CIP was intended to help their government get around that little problem. Which is why we didn’t really care what they imported—scotch, Mercedes limos, baby food—just as long as the program was funneling currency into the war effort to make up for all those missing taxes. And it has. About forty percent of their economy comes from CIP piasters.”

  “Jesus. How much does our government pour into this Commodity Import Program?” I said.

  “Two million a week and rising,” Tuttle said, “until Lodge closed the tap.”

  Robeson whistled. “And the late General Lang was the honcho wrangling all this cash?”

  “Yup. The dollars USAID put up to buy the credits, the piasters from the licensees for the discounted money. Nhu’s political party treasury. The gratitude from the license winners. As well as receipts for various . . . other accounts.”

  Robeson gave him his best innocent look. “Other accounts?”

  “Like port fees for all the merchant and military supply ships waiting weeks, sometimes months, for the port director to assign them a berth. First they make them wait, then they charge them for the privilege of waiting.” Tuttle squinted against the smoke.

  Robeson said, “How much are we talkin’ about?”

  “Something like three to seven grand for each supply ship waiting to be unloaded, Jim said. Then there’s import tariffs on all the commodities rafting in here under CIP. Years ago it was eighteen piasters for every dollar’s worth of goods. General Lang refused us access to the current figures.”

  “Even though these are tariffs on American goods financed with American money?” Robeson asked. “He actually said no dice?”

  “Yep. ‘Vietnamese government business,’ not ours.”

  I stretched out my leg to relieve the dengue ache in my knee. “And all the money Furth was tracking went through General Lang, coming and going?”

  Tuttle nodded. “Lang was the hub, Brother Nhu’s bagman.”

  “Busboy for the fat cats’ table,” Robeson muttered.

  “More like the family’s personal banker. Who knows how much CIP money actually made it to the war effort and how much went straight into the Ngo family’s accounts. When Madame Nhu wanted to go shopping for properties in Brazil and France, or pick up a rubber plantation or a coal mine, or buy the entire Saigon bus company, the Dragon Lady got her funds from General Lang. Her other brother-in-law, the archbishop? Turns out he likes to shop too. Tea plantations, coffee plantations, timber concessions. Plunked down four million dollars for the Charner department store, for God’s sake. Lang provided the cash.”

  “Kee-rist,” Robeson said. “They shoulda kept Lang protected around the clock, chauffeured everywhere in a mink-lined tank. You know, you make the Diem regime sound like the mob.”

  “Damn straight. This isn’t some half-assed larceny,” he said. “It’s sophisticated and systemic. The regime doesn’t just countenance corruption. Corruption is what keeps the treasury filled and the government fueled. Diem and Nhu and the rest of their clan? They’re not so interested in prosecuting the war. But they sure as hell want the machinery of war to keep cranking so they can keep pocketing their profits. The regime’s a fucking cartel that rents us their armed forces and this place to fuck up. In return, we permit our hosts to go through our pockets extracting every last dime, while we fill their government coffers and subsidize their luxury imports, send them advisors and pilots and police experts. Train their fliers, their security people, their soldiers. We send them free everything and look away as they pillage our supply line. We just tot up our losses and order more.”

  Tuttle took another drag. Ash fell across his front. “One day . . .” He hesitated. Long seconds passed. “We made a mistake.”

  “An accounting error?”

  Tuttle sawed off more ash and glared at Robeson. “I wish. Major LaValle had a connection at the National Bank. He found large amounts of cash being deposited into a custodial account, piasters flooding in and gushing out. We’re talking billions taken out of circulation in Viet Nam. Transported to General Lang’s right-hand man in Hong Kong, a colonel posted there as an attaché, but somehow receiving this cash is his only responsibility. He channels it straight into a Crown Colony bank where it’s deposited at half its value.”

  “You’re not talking about wire transfers?” Robeson said.

  “No. Actual physical piasters sucked out of the marketplace here and carried there. We’re talking planeloads. A goddamn torrent of wholesaled Vietnamese money. A high-discount, high-volume business. So much pouring out of the country, there’s a rolling risk of a currency drought.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “Planeloads of piasters regularly bucket out of Viet Nam into a British colony bank and nobo
dy—no one in international business or banking—ever notices? Not even Viet merchants when they start running out of change in the till?”

  Robeson looked at Tuttle, chin resting on his hand. “It’s kinda incredible—so much local money leaving the country that it threatens to dry up circulation.”

  “You’re right,” said Tuttle. “There should’ve been noticeable shortages here. There was one—very briefly—in June of last year. But never since, because the wholesaled bricks of cash don’t sit in Hong Kong long enough. They’re sold on quickly.”

  I scratched at an ear. “The piaster isn’t an international currency. Its only value is local. Exporting planeloads of it seems nuts. Who’d want to buy piasters?”

  Tuttle laughed. “Exactly right. Which is why they’re unloaded at fire sale prices. Each shipment goes immediately to a lone buyer”—Tuttle tapped the coffee table—“who brings it right back here.”

  Robeson’s eyes sprang wide. “Who in the hell? The VC?”

  Tuttle jiggled his foot nervously, aware it might be unwise to answer but unable to resist. “Nope,” he said, grinning. “Uncle Sam.”

  “The United States government.” I paced to the window. A couple frolicked with a beach ball in the swimming pool below. Alarm bells were going off in my head. “Treasury?”

  “Nah,” said Robeson. “The set-up’s too hinky.”

  “CIA?”

  “Bingo. The Agency buys up the piasters dirt cheap and hustles them straight into a huge walk-in refrigerator out by Tan Son Nhut.” Tuttle lay back on the couch, forearm across his brow. “Nobody ever notices the drain because the dough gets transfused into the local economy real quick. Whatever CIA undertaking requires cash payment, which is all of them, the cash comes from that locker.”

  Robeson whistled. “Holy cow.”

  “Think about it,” Tuttle said. “The Agency can’t exactly issue checks. Agency paymasters and field agents go to the walk-in fridge and load up like it’s the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Cash to make payroll for Montagnard mercenaries fighting Communists in the highlands, wages for sixty-five thousand village militiamen. Money for arms, for Agency informants, Nung guards, a quarter million a month for Colonel Tung’s Red Berets guarding Diem at the palace.” He brushed ash from his shirt with the back of his hand. “Marauders working secretly out of Da Nang, VC turncoats who need a cash stake to start over, farmers with accidentally slain livestock or destroyed crops. Bounties on VC weapons, stipends to ralliers, payouts to Vietnamese legislators we like who have enemies we don’t like. Some general or province governor whose goodwill we want to buy, who can’t afford the going price for his next promotion. Tokens of appreciation for reporters and political activists we want to empower, delivered along with lists of groups we’d like to see them subvert. Propaganda pamphlets, rice, documentary films . . . It’s all there for the taking.”