by Tim Weiner
Lyndon Johnson had been ready to bomb North Vietnam for two months. On his orders, in June 1964, Bill Bundy, the assistant secretary of state for the Far East, brother of the national security adviser, and a veteran CIA analyst, had drawn up a war resolution to be sent to Congress when the moment was ripe.
The fake intelligence fit perfectly into the preconceived policy. On August 7, Congress authorized the war in Vietnam. The House voted 416–0. The Senate voted 88–2. It was a “Greek tragedy,” Cline said, an act of political theater reprised four decades later when false intelligence on the Iraqi arsenal upheld another president’s rationale for war.
It remained to Lyndon Johnson to sum up what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, which he did four years after the fact. “Hell,” said the president, “those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”
23. “MORE COURAGE
THAN WISDOM”
“Vietnam was my nightmare for a good ten years,” Richard Helms wrote. As he rose from chief of the clandestine service to become the director of central intelligence, the war was always with him. “Like an incubus, it involved efforts which were never to seem successful, and demands which could never be met but which were repeated, doubled, intensified, and redoubled.
“We tried every operational approach in the book, and committed our most experienced field operatives to the effort to get inside the government in Hanoi,” Helms recounted. “Within the Agency, our failure to penetrate the North Vietnamese government was the single most frustrating aspect of those years. We could not determine what was going on at the highest levels of Ho’s government, nor could we learn how policy was made or who was making it.” At the root of this failure of intelligence was “our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language,” he said.
We did not choose to know, so we did not know how much we did not know.
“The great sadness,” Helms said in an oral history recorded for the LBJ Library, “was our ignorance—or innocence, if you like—which led us to mis-assess, not comprehend, and make a lot of wrong decisions.”
Lyndon Johnson also had a recurring dream about Vietnam. If he ever wavered on the war, if he faltered, if he lost, “there would be Robert Kennedy out in front leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam. That I was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine. Oh, I could see it coming, all right. Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting and running toward me: ‘Coward! Traitor! Weakling!’”
“Mc CONE’S WAR”
The strength of the Vietcong, the communist guerrillas in the south, continued to grow. A new ambassador, General Maxwell Taylor, late of the Special Group (Counterinsurgency), and Bill Colby, the CIA’s Far East division chief, searched for a new strategy against the shadowy terrorists. “Counterinsurgency became an almost ridiculous battle cry,” said Robert Amory, who had stepped down after nine years as the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence to become the White House budget officer for classified programs. “It meant so many things to so many different people.” But Bobby Kennedy knew its meaning, and he boiled it down to its essence. “What we needed,” he said, “were people who could shoot guns.”
On November 16, 1964, an explosive work by Peer de Silva, the CIA’s station chief in Saigon, landed on John McCone’s desk at headquarters. It was titled “Our Counterinsurgency Experiment and Its Implications.” Helms and Colby had read it and approved it. It was a bold idea with one great risk: the potential “to turn ‘McNamara’s War’ into ‘McCone’s War,’” as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Marshall Carter bluntly warned his boss that day.
De Silva had been trying to extend the CIA’s power in South Vietnam by creating paramilitary patrols in the provinces to hunt down the Vietcong. Working with the interior minister and the chief of the national police, de Silva bought an estate in the northeast corner of South Vietnam from a crooked labor-union kingpin and began offering a crash course in counterinsurgency for civilians. In the first week of November 1964, as Americans were electing President Johnson to a full term, de Silva had flown up to inspect his fledgling project. His officers had trained three teams of forty Vietnamese recruits who had reported killing 167 Vietcong while losing only 6 of their own. Now de Silva wanted to fly five thousand South Vietnamese citizens up to the estate from all over the country for a three-month education in military and political tactics taught by CIA officers and American military advisers. They would return home, in de Silva’s words, as “counter-terror teams,” and they would kill the Vietcong.
John McCone had a lot of faith in Peer de Silva, and he gave his approval. But he felt it was a losing battle. The day after de Silva’s memo arrived, McCone walked into the White House and for the second time tendered his resignation to President Johnson. He offered a choice of qualified successors and begged to take his leave. Once again, not for the last time, the president ignored the director of central intelligence.
McCone stayed on while the crises confronting him piled up. He believed, as did the presidents he served, in the domino theory. He told the future president, Representative Gerald R. Ford, that “if South Vietnam fell to the communists, Laos and Cambodia would certainly go, followed by Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and eventually the Philippines,” which would have “a vast effect” on the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. He did not think the CIA was equipped to fight insurgents and terrorists, and he feared that “the VC may be the wave of the future.” He was quite certain that the CIA was incapable of combating the Vietcong.
De Silva later mourned the agency’s “blindness” to the enemy and its strategy. In the villages, “the Vietcong use of terror was purposeful, precise, and frightful to behold,” he wrote. The peasants “would feed them, recruit for them, conceal them, and provide them with all the intelligence the Vietcong needed.” Then, at the end of 1964, the VC took the war to the capital. “The Vietcong use of terror within the city of Saigon was frequent, sometimes random, and sometimes carefully planned and executed,” de Silva wrote. Secretary of Defense McNamara just missed being hit by a roadside bomb planted on the highway to the city from the airport. A car bomb destroyed the bachelor officers’ quarters in Saigon on Christmas Eve 1964. Slowly the losses mounted as suicide bombers and sappers struck at will. At 2 a.m. on February 7, 1965, the Vietcong attacked an American base in Pleiku, the central highlands of Vietnam. Eight Americans died. When the firefight was over, the Americans searched the body of one of the Vietcong attackers and found a very precise map of the base in his pack.
We had more weapons, and bigger ones, but they had more spies, and better ones. It was a decisive difference.
Four days later, Lyndon Johnson lashed out. Dumb bombs, cluster bombs, and napalm bombs fell on Vietnam. The White House sent an urgent message to Saigon seeking the CIA’s best estimate of the situation. George W. Allen, the most experienced Vietnam intelligence analyst at the Saigon station, said the enemy would not be deterred by bombs. It was growing stronger. Its will was unbroken. But Ambassador Maxwell Taylor went over the report line by line, methodically deleting each pessimistic paragraph before sending it on to the president. The CIA’s men in Saigon took note that bad news was not welcome. The corruption of intelligence at the hands of political generals, civilian commanders, and the agency itself continued. There would not be a truly influential report from the CIA to the president on the subject of the war for three more years.
On March 8, the marines landed in Da Nang in full battle dress. Beautiful girls met them with garlands. In Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh prepared his own reception.
On March 30, Peer de Silva was in his second-floor office in the CIA station in Saigon, catercorner to the embassy, talking on the telephone with one of his officers and staring out the window at a man pushing an old gray Peugeot sedan
up the street. De Silva looked down at the driver’s seat and saw a detonator burning.
“My world turned to glue and slow motion as my mind told me this car was a bomb,” de Silva remembered. “With the phone still in my hand and without conscious thought, I began falling away from the window and turned as I fell, but I was only halfway to the floor when the car exploded.” Flying glass and shards of metal slashed de Silva’s eyes and ears and throat. The blast killed at least twenty people in the street and de Silva’s twenty-two-year-old secretary. Two CIA officers inside the station were permanently blinded. Sixty other CIA and embassy personnel were injured. George Allen suffered multiple contusions, cuts, and a concussion. De Silva lost the vision in his left eye. Doctors pumped him full of painkillers, swaddled his head in gauze, and told him he might go completely blind if he stayed on in Saigon.
The president wondered how to fight an enemy he could not see. “There must be somebody out there that’s got enough brains to figure out some way that we can find some special targets to hit on,” Johnson demanded as night fell in Saigon. He decided to pour thousands more troops into battle and ratchet up the bombing campaign. He never once consulted the director of central intelligence.
“A MILITARY EFFORT THAT WE CANNOT WIN”
On April 2, 1965, John McCone quit for the last time, effective as soon as Lyndon Johnson selected a successor. He delivered a fateful prediction for the president: “With the passage of each day and each week, we can expect increasing pressure to stop the bombing,” he said. “This will come from various elements of the American public, from the press, the United Nations and world opinion. Therefore time will run against us in this operation and I think the North Vietnamese are counting on this.” One of his best analysts, Harold Ford, told him: “We are becoming progressively divorced from reality in Vietnam” and “proceeding with far more courage than wisdom.” McCone now understood that. He told McNamara that the nation was about to “drift into a combat situation where victory would be dubious.” His final warning to the President was blunt as it could be: “We will find ourselves mired down in combat in the jungle in a military effort that we cannot win, and from which we will have extreme difficulty extracting ourselves.”
Lyndon Johnson had stopped listening to John McCone long ago. The director left office knowing he had had no impact whatsoever on the thinking of the president of the United States. Like almost all who followed him, LBJ liked the agency’s work only if it fit his thinking. When it did not, it went into the wastebasket. “Let me tell you about these intelligence guys,” he said. “When I was growing up in Texas, we had a cow named Bessie. I’d go out early and milk her. I’d get her in the stanchion, seat myself, and squeeze out a pail of fresh milk. One day I’d worked hard and gotten a full pail of milk, but I wasn’t paying attention, and old Bessie swung her shit-smeared tail through that bucket of milk. Now, you know, that’s what these intelligence guys do. You work hard and get a good program or policy going, and they swing a shit-smeared tail through it.”
24. “THE BEGINNING
OF A LONG SLIDE
DOWNWARDS”
The president went looking for “a great man” to serve as the new director of central intelligence—“one that can light the fuse if it’s just got to be done to save his country.”
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Marshall Carter warned against choosing an outsider. He said it would be “a grave error” to select a military yes-man and “a disaster” to choose a political crony; if the White House thought the CIA had no one from within who was worthy, “they had better close up the place and give it to the Indians.” Richard Helms was the near-unanimous choice among the president’s national-security team—McCone, McNamara, Rusk, and Bundy.
Johnson heeded none of them. On the afternoon of April 6, 1965, he placed a call to a fifty-nine-year-old retired admiral named Red Raborn, a native son of Decatur, Texas. Raborn had political credentials: he had won LBJ’s affection by appearing in a paid television announcement during the 1964 campaign, calling the Republican candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, too dumb to be president. His claim to fame was managing the development of the Polaris nuclear missile for the navy’s submarines, an effort that won him friends in Congress. He was a nice man with a nice job in the aerospace industry and a nice spread in Palm Springs overlooking the eleventh fairway of his favorite golf course.
Red Raborn stood at attention at the sound of his commander in chief’s voice. “Now, I need you,” Lyndon Johnson said, “and need you awful bad awful quick.” They were quite a ways into their conversation before Raborn realized that LBJ wanted him to run the CIA. The president promised that Richard Helms, as the new deputy director, would do the heavy lifting. “You could take you a nap every day after lunch,” he said. “We won’t overwork you.” Appealing to Raborn’s patriotism, laying on the down-home charm, Johnson said: “I know what the old warhorse does when he hear the bell ring.”
The admiral came aboard on April 28, 1965. The president put on a big show for his swearing-in at the White House, saying he had searched the nation far and wide and found only one man who could do the job. Tears of gratitude ran down Raborn’s face. It was his last happy moment as director of central intelligence.
The Dominican Republic exploded that same day. The United States had tried and failed to make the nation the showplace of the Caribbean after the American-supported assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961. Now armed rebels were fighting in the streets of the capital. Johnson decided to send in four hundred U.S. Marines, along with the FBI and reinforcements for the CIA station. It was the first large-scale landing of American forces in Latin America since 1928, and the first armed adventure of its kind in the Caribbean since the Bay of Pigs.
At a full-dress White House meeting that night, Raborn reported—without evidence, and without qualification—that the rebels were controlled by Cuba. “In my opinion this is a real struggle mounted by Mr. Castro,” Raborn said the next morning in a phone conversation with the president. “There is no question in my mind that this is the start of Castro’s expansion.”
The president asked: “How many Castro terrorists are there?”
Raborn replied: “Well, we have positively identified 8 of them. And I sent a list over to the White House about 6 o’clock—it should be in the Situation Room—who they are, what they are doing and what their training has been.” The list of the eight “Castro terrorists” appeared in a CIA memorandum, which read: “There is no evidence that the Castro regime is directly involved in the current insurrection.”
The president hung up the phone and decided to send a thousand more marines to the Dominican Republic.
Had there been any warning of the crisis from the CIA? the president asked his national security adviser that morning. “There was nothing,” Bundy replied.
“Our CIA says this is a completely led…Castro operation,” the president told his personal lawyer, Abe Fortas, as 2,500 army paratroopers landed in the Dominican Republic on April 30. “They say it is! Their people on the inside tell us!…There ain’t no doubt about this being Castro now…. They are moving other places in the hemisphere. It may be part of a whole Communistic pattern tied in with Vietnam…. The worst domestic political disaster we could suffer would be for Castro to take over.” The president prepared to send 6,500 more American soldiers to Santo Domingo.
But McNamara mistrusted what Raborn was telling the president. “You don’t think CIA can document it?” Johnson asked the secretary of defense. “I don’t think so, Mr. President,” McNamara replied. “You don’t know that Castro is trying to do anything. You would have a hard time proving to any group that Castro has done more than train these people, and we have trained a lot of people.”
That gave the president pause. “Well, now, don’t you think that’s something that you and Raborn and I ought to talk about?” the president said. “CIA told me that there were two Castro leaders involved. And a little
later, they told me eight, and a little later, they told me fifty-eight….”
“I just don’t believe the story,” MacNamara said flatly.
The president nonetheless insisted in a speech to the American people that he would not allow “Communist conspirators” in the Dominican Republic to establish “another Communist government in the Western Hemisphere.”
Raborn’s reporting on the crisis did for LBJ what the U-2 had done for Eisenhower and the Bay of Pigs for Kennedy. It led directly to the first assertion by the American press that Lyndon Johnson had a “credibility gap.” The phrase was first published on May 23, 1965. It stung, and it stuck.
The president took no further counsel from his new director of central intelligence.
Morale plunged at headquarters under Raborn’s unsteady command. “It was tragic,” said Ray Cline, the deputy director of intelligence, “the beginning of a long slide downwards.” The bitter joke was that Dulles had run a happy ship, McCone a tight ship, and Raborn a sinking ship. “Poor old Raborn,” said Red White, his third-in-command as executive director. “He came out there every morning at 6:30 and had breakfast thinking the President would call him someday.” Johnson never did. It was painfully clear that Raborn was “not qualified to run the CIA,” White said. The hapless admiral was “completely out in left field. If you talked about foreign countries, he wouldn’t know if you were talking about a country in Africa or South America.” The new director made a fool of himself while testifying in secret to Congress, Senator Richard Russell warned LBJ: “Raborn has got one failing that’s going to get him in trouble. He won’t ever admit he don’t know…. If you ever decide to get rid of him, you just put that fellow Helms in there. He got more sense than any of them.”
