by Ted Gup
At another White House meeting, on February 28, 1961, Deuel and others prepped Kennedy for an upcoming news conference. Kennedy was steamed at the CIA’s apparent intelligence failures in the Congo, complaining that Agency reports were false or misleading. He turned to Deuel. “What’s the matter—have you got only one man there in the Congo?” Kennedy asked.
“He smiled when he said it,” wrote Deuel in a memo to Dulles. “He made it clear however that he meant his criticisms seriously.”
In March Deuel was relieved of White House responsibilities. His replacement: his old friend Dick Helms.
But by May 1961 the White House and CIA were already the targets of fierce criticism in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle. Deuel understood that henceforth nothing would be the same. He wrote his son Mike: “We’ve been living—I won’t say in a fool’s paradise, but we’ve been living charmed lives all this time until now. Our immunity from exposure and attack has been partly luck, partly due to the laziness and lack of imagination of some editors and publishers, partly to self-restraint imposed by patriotism on the part of others, partly to trust in the Old Man [Allen Dulles], partly to the Old Man’s skill in handling his public relations—and, above all, to the fact that we’ve had a series of fantastic successes. We’ve had a few failures too, but they either haven’t amounted to much or we haven’t been found out.”
With the Bay of Pigs, all that had now changed.
Mike Deuel inherited his father’s intellect, but something else as well. Where Wally Deuel had always been most comfortable standing on the sidelines as observer or adviser, his son Mike was determined to be a player. Wherever the action was most intense, that was where Mike Deuel wanted to be. Mike was what his father always hungered to be— not the scribe but the doer, living on the edge. His son was all of that— a romantic and roguish figure in whom his father could realize a lifetime of pipe dreams.
Physically Mike Deuel was not particularly formidable, but he had little regard for his own well-being and even as a child took pride in throwing himself in the way of the biggest kid on the playing field. More than once he ended up in the hospital, not because he was accident-prone, but because caution was a concept foreign to him. On March 14, 1949, the Washington Post ran a picture of eleven-year-old Mike Deuel smiling in his hospital bed after plummeting thirty feet from a two-story house to a concrete pavement. He suffered a concussion, a fractured elbow, and a cracked vertebra, but was delighted to have the time to build a model plane. Even then, he viewed fear and pain as elements to test his will.
On November 9, 1953, sixteen-year-old Mike Deuel was in a bruising football game when, in the second quarter, he became aware of a pain in his side. He felt tired and unable to run. But he played through the entire game without complaining, and it was not until that evening that he mentioned his discomfort. Not long after, an ambulance arrived to take him off to Garfield Hospital. There he would remain for the next four weeks with a ruptured kidney. Two operations later his only concern was that it not interfere with the next season’s football.
His father, Wally, was attracted to those in power but also somewhat awed by it. Son Mike was utterly unintimidated by title or rank. In May 1950 he wrote a letter to U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas: “I have recently red [sic] a slight story about your proposed vacation trip across Iran on horseback.
“Before I go any further I might introduce myself. I’m Mike Deuel, 12, my father is a foreign affairs correspondent for the Saint Louis Post Dispatch.” Deuel went on to explain that he had all As and Bs in school, a taste for adventure, and would very much like to accompany Justice Douglas on his next trip abroad.
On May 8, 1950, Justice Douglas replied:
“My dear Mike, I greatly enjoyed your recent letter. I am glad faraway places, high mountains and horses interest you. There is a great joy in exploration. I hope you find time in your life for a lot of it.
“I am not sure that I will make another trip abroad this summer. Should I do so it would be a great pleasure to have you along. But there is a difficulty. I have a son just 18 years old. He was with me last summer in the Middle East and we had a wonderful time together . . . He has first claim to go, as you know. If I cannot take him, I don’t know how I could take you. You understand, I am sure. I am very sorry for I think you and I would have a great time together. Yours Truly, William O. Douglas.”
There was little that Mike Deuel did not excel at. Where natural talent failed, pure gumption kicked in. At Washington’s Western High School he played fullback and made the All-Star D.C. team—while serving as president of the student council. Graduating in 1955, he went to Cornell as one of the school’s twenty-five National Scholars.
At Cornell Deuel played lacrosse and eagerly awaited the day his team faced Syracuse and the chance to butt heads with that school’s most fiercesome athlete. Butt heads he did, though in each collision he got the worse of the exchange. The player he was so determined to stop was named Jim Brown, and he would go on to become one of the greatest running backs in NFL history. Deuel’s classmates watched in disbelief as the modest-sized Deuel time and again attempted in vain to stand his ground against the broad-shouldered juggernaut from Syracuse. Such pluck became the stuff of myth.
At Cornell’s Sigma Phi fraternity Deuel was seen as a spirited and gutsy classmate, with a puckish, sometimes lusty playfulness. As editor of the fraternity newspaper his junior year, he once wrote an article describing the fiancée of a senior fraternity brother as “succulent and squab-like”—apparently an accurate enough description. But the senior whose fiancée was so described was not amused by the phrase, and a short time later a repentant Deuel was observed on hands and knees, indelible marker in hand, blacking out each such reference from a stack of yet-to-be-distributed newsletters.
With prematurely salt-and-pepper hair cropped to a perfect brush cut, a devil-may-care smile, and squared jaw, he was a dashing figure— never more so than when he once returned to Cornell from the marines in full dress uniform, starched blue collar, white gloves, scabbard, and swagger stick. He was the very image of the sturdy warrior but not quite able to fully conceal the little boy’s thrill to be in uniform.
Deuel chose the marines because he hoped they would meet his own standards of toughness. It was not that he spoiled for a fight—he did not—but he was constantly looking for ways to test his mettle. During basic training, when it was his turn to lead a platoon, he inadvertently took his men into an ambush. Instead of capitulating, he yelled “Charge!” He was named that month’s outstanding platoon leader.
But as a Marine Corps officer, he seemed oddly distanced from the tasks at hand. To a Cornell classmate he wrote on July 16, 1960: “We still take orders from mean men afflicted with chronic flatulence and we still run until puddles of earnest sweat accumulate around us.” He seemed mildly amused by the regimentation. “I’m drunk with power but clear of eye,” he wrote his family in 1961. “My hair is short and so is my patience. When I say ‘frog,’ my men jump. When I say ‘merde’ they say how much and what color?”
But for Mike Deuel, not even the marines supplied enough action. In a letter home, typically candid and irreverent for Deuel, he wrote: “Life here creeps on in an undetectable pace, so much so that I am thrown back on my strong inner resources—tobacco, (awful) whiskey and pornography.”
Hungry for more action, Deuel left the marines and in 1961 joined the CIA. He knew he was in the right place when an Agency lecturer told him: “You were brought into the service to provide new blood. Bleed a little.” Instead of a cushy desk job, Deuel sought out the clandestine service and the most rigorous training the CIA offered. While nearly all clandestine officers passed through Camp Perry with its indoctrination courses and basics in tradecraft, Deuel applied to undertake the specialized program in jungle warfare.
On April 2, 1962, Deuel and the toughest of his Camp Perry classmates began what was called Paramilitary Course 3, at the Jungle Warfare Training Center, in
the Canal Zone. By 1962 most of the old guard of paramilitary experts trained in World War II were now too old to undertake paramilitary operations, and most of the paramilitary training had been discontinued a decade earlier. At the very time when President Kennedy resolved that the United States would blunt Soviet and Chinese aggression whenever and wherever it showed up, the Agency was woefully strapped for so-called paramilitary knuckledraggers. To the outside world such a term might have smacked of ridicule, suggesting Cro-Magnon-like warriors, but to the Agency it was an honorific term recalling the glory days of OSS operations, of raw courage and finely honed survival skills.
The course Deuel and his fourteen CIA classmates found themselves in was billed as “realistic, rough, and hazardous.” It was all this and more. The instructor was Eli Popovich, a former OSS operative who had, among countless hair-raising missions, rescued downed American crewmen from behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia during World War II. He had a well-deserved reputation for being afraid of no man and no terrain. Agency recruits would later recall him bagging a huge python, hacking it into steaks, and dining on it as if it were a tender fillet.
The course was designed to turn young CIA recruits into jungle warfare experts in a mere three weeks. Awaiting most of them were jungle assignments as case officers leading counterinsurgency movements in Southeast Asia, particularly the CIA’s still-secret war in Laos. The course curriculum acquainted the CIA’s junior-officers-in-training (JOTs) in such topics as “Effects of Heat,” “Snakes and Animals,” “Reconnaissance Patrolling,” “Ambush and Counter-Ambush,” “Evasion and Escape,” and “Guerrilla Operations.”
Even Popovich was astounded by the caliber of recruits. In a memo stamped “Secret” he noted: “Our JOT’s, often called ‘intellectuals’ and/or ‘Eggheads,’ have demonstrated that they are not only intelligent young men, but also are capable of being physically and mentally tough when necessary to carry out the most difficult tasks under adverse tactical conditions . . . In spite of drastic change in climate, temperature, and humidity, and while being constantly harassed with cuts, bruises, bites from hornets, ants, and vampires [bats], and infections from black palm and sand box trees, they carried out their assigned tasks without undue gripes or complaints.”
Not everyone finished the course. One man fell to fever. Another broke his leg on the “slide for life,” a cable stretched across a river.
There was intense competition between the men, each one wanting not only to complete the course but to distinguish himself as the toughest, most resourceful and aggressive officer. Early on, Mike Deuel recognized that classmates Ralph McLean, Robert Manning, Andre LeGallo, and above all Richard Holm were his primary competitors.
But if the course brought out rivalries, it also imbued the men with a lasting esprit de corps. In the jungles of the Canal Zone were born friendships that would endure a lifetime. No greater friendships were forged than those between Deuel, McLean, Manning, and Holm. From the beginning, when Deuel and Holm entered the Agency as callow JOTs in June 1961, they had shared a special unspoken bond. They both adored sports, had a deep revulsion to Communism, were religious agnostics, and longed to make a difference in the world.
The two not only endured but reveled in the grueling jungle course, a program also given to elite military units. The CIA contingent was under cover as civilian employees of the U.S. Army Element, Joint Operational Group (8739). Each CIA officer was issued a false set of orders, fake IDs, and bogus medical records. Upon graduation the commanding officer of the exercise wryly noted: “There is a small group of civilians in this course from the United Fruit Company and although some of them have never been in uniform they have carried out their assigned tasks in this course as required with the rest of the class members in a manner that is worthy of praise and deserving of a fine hand.” As the applause died down, the officer told CIA Training Director Popovich that Mike Deuel was the top man in the class, though his friends Holm, McLean, and LeGallo had slightly outscored him.
From the jungles of the Canal Zone, Deuel was dispatched to Langley to serve on the Laos desk, providing tactical and logistic support to the men in the field and acting as a transit point for outgoing orders and incoming intelligence. Deuel understood, as did everyone in the clandestine service, that Laos was center-stage in the struggle with Communism.
As far back as January 19, 1961—the day before Kennedy’s inauguration—the incoming president and the outgoing Eisenhower had spent more time discussing the prickly issue of Laos than any other subject. Following a 1954 international agreement, Laos was to remain neutral, free of outside intervention and superpower meddling. But the Communists brazenly ignored such restraints, and the United States, in what came to be known as “the secret war,” fought bitterly to repel them and disrupt the tide of men and matériel that flowed through the country along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and into the hands of the North Vietnamese.
“Laos,” Kennedy once declared, “is far away from America, but the world is small . . . The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence. Its own safety runs with the safety of us all—in real neutrality observed by all.” Instead of neutrality, Laos would be decimated by undeclared war. Not since the Bay of Pigs had the CIA staked so much on a single foreign gambit.
Deuel seized the first opportunity he had to go to Laos. Four members of his JOT class volunteered for that country assignment. Among them was his friend and colleague Dick Holm. Both he and Deuel thrived in the primitive backcountry. To his mother and father Mike Deuel wrote: “After about a week starts a job big and responsible enough to inspire equal parts of pleasure and panic. In times past, this combination has been enough to overcome my habitual mental lassitude; there may be cause for optimism . . . But, now to my rude bower. Tomorrow, I must fight off wild Asian tigers and semi-wild Eurasian girls. Once more into the Breech?”
It was not only the job that captivated Deuel but the physical splendor of Laos as well. “This area is volcanic,” he wrote. “A plateau dominates south Laos and then drops from the plateau are sheer and green. Throughout the year, huge waterfalls drop down to the lowlands around the plateau . . .”
It was a raw existence that Deuel lived, working fifteen to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, then collapsing in exhaustion. But he never lost his sense of humor. In time he acquired an odd and exotic menagerie of pets, including cats, dogs, monkeys, and civets. “Chou,” he wrote his parents, “is the horniest dog that God ever put on earth; he even stares at young girls. At age five months and height at the withers of 7½ inches, he sired a litter out of a middle aged female who stands 15 inches high. I am lost in admiration.” In time, his penchant for animals was jokingly referred to as “Deuel’s Zoo.”
But it was work that kept Deuel’s mind focused. At times he saw his role in almost Wagnerian terms, but was always quick to puncture any sense of self-importance. In a letter home, twenty-six-year-old Deuel wrote:
“In fact there are no dramatic reports a’tall a’tall. All is prosaic, too much so . . . I dream of glory and future excitements. Of course when I get them, I’ll probably ask for the next boat home but I think the time has not yet come for the dread assassin of the sea to become the sacred defenders of the home.
“Besides, the Creeping Red Menace still threatens which should justify continued gainful employment for citizens abroad (and at home). Of course before you can fight the Reds, you must survive local traffic and VD—and that’s no easy thing.”
At about the same time that Deuel arrived in Laos, a comely twenty-two-year-old CIA secretary named Judy Doherty was working back at Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. She was asked where she might like to be posted. She had grown up in the small coal-mining town of Bulpitt, Illinois, population 250. She had listed Paris and Rome and Lima, names out of a small-town fantasy. Some time later an Agency officer informed her she had been assigned to Bangkok, Thailand. She had never heard of it. In November 1962 she found herse
lf working at the embassy there under State Department cover. There she met the dashing young Mike Deuel, though she had earlier caught the eye of both Deuel and his friend Dick Holm, when all three were still at Langley. Judith Doherty was far too pretty to have escaped the notice of men like Deuel and Holm. “We didn’t walk blindfolded up and down the halls,” Dick Holm would say.
But it was Deuel who began courting Judy Doherty. “Saw my favorite secretary for two days in Bangkok,” Deuel wrote his father. “She showed her normal distrust of my intentions which gives evidence of good sense on her part. I’m not sure whether she was relieved or not to see me go.”
In late August 1964 Deuel “smuggled” Judy Doherty into Pakse, Laos, aboard one of the Air America planes at his disposal. His purpose was to give her a “cold-eyed look” at his lifestyle and to see how she might cope with it. His home was a farmhouse with high ceilings and many windows, a mix of French and Lao. His bed was a cotlike affair, a bamboo platform warmed by two blankets. Judy passed the test brilliantly. “She’s so sensible that she’s downright unromantic sometimes,” he wrote. “This is good. Starry eyes would not be an asset.”
“I’d swear an oath before the Commission of the American Baseball League to marry this one, she’s that good,” he wrote his father a short time later.
