by Tim Weiner
Richard Helms ran the CIA while Raborn fumbled and flailed. He had three major covert-action campaigns to fight that year. Each one had been started by President Eisenhower, then strengthened by President Kennedy, and now was central to LBJ’s quest to win the war in Southeast Asia. In Laos, the CIA fought to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In Thailand, it set out to fix the elections. In Indonesia, it provided secret support for leaders who massacred countless communists. All three nations were dominoes to the presidents who ordered the CIA to keep them in line, fearing that if one fell, Vietnam would fall.
On July 2, LBJ called Eisenhower for advice on escalating the war. The American death toll in Vietnam stood at 446. The ninth junta since the assassination of President Diem had just seized power, led by Nguyen Cao Ky, a pilot who had dropped paramilitary agents to their death on CIA missions, and by Nguyen Van Thieu, a general who later assumed the presidency. Ky was vicious, Thieu corrupt. Together they were the public face of democracy in South Vietnam. “You think that we can really beat the Vietcong out there?” the president asked. Victory depended entirely on good intelligence, Eisenhower replied, and “this is the hardest thing.”
“A SACRED WAR”
Laos started out as an intelligence war. Under accords signed by the superpowers and their allies, all foreign fighters were supposed to leave the country. The newly arrived American ambassador, William Sullivan, had helped negotiate the accords himself. But Hanoi kept thousands of troops in the north, bolstering the communist forces, the Pathet Lao, and the CIA had its spies and shadow soldiers everywhere else in Laos. Station chiefs and their officers had orders to fight a war in secret, defying diplomatic niceties and the military facts on the ground.
In the summer of 1965, as Lyndon Johnson sent tens of thousands of American troops to Vietnam, the war in Laos was being run by about thirty CIA officers. Backed by military supplies flown in by agency pilots, they armed the Hmong tribesmen who served as guerrilla fighters, traveled to the edges of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and oversaw Thai commandos trained by the CIA’s Bill Lair.
Lair ran the war in Laos from a secret compound inside a base at Udorn, built by the CIA and the Pentagon, just across the Mekong River in Thailand. He was forty, and he had been working for the CIA in Southeast Asia for fourteen years. His forebears had lived in Texas since the Alamo, but he was married to a Thai woman, ate sticky rice with hot peppers, and drank Hmong firewater. When things went wrong in Laos, he locked the facts in his safe. When his fellow CIA officers died in battle, he kept their fates classified. The war was supposed to be “as invisible as possible,” Lair said. “The idea then was to keep that secret because at the time we went in there, we didn’t have no idea in the long range what the U.S. was going to do…. Once they got started on this tactic of keeping it secret, it’s pretty hard to change it.”
The CIA officer who fought hardest in Laos was Anthony Poshepny, known to all as Tony Poe. In 1965, he, too, was forty years old. Wounded in battle as a teenage marine at Iwo Jima, a veteran of the CIA’s paramilitary missions in the Korean War, he was one of the five CIA officers who fled the island of Sumatra by submarine in 1958 as the coup in Indonesia collapsed. Poe lived at the CIA’s base in the Long Tieng valley of central Laos, close to a hundred miles north of the capital. With a bottle of Scotch or Hmong rice whisky his constant companion, Tony Poe was the field commander of the secret war, walking point on the highland trails and valley paths with his Hmong and Thai troops. He had gone completely native and more than a little crazy.
“He did all these damn bizarre things,” Lair said. “I knew if you shipped Tony home he wouldn’t last five minutes in the hallways back there. He’d be out of the Agency. But, within the Agency you had a lot of those guys who admired him because they never were close to it, see, and he had done some good things. The big wheels at the Agency all knew exactly what was happening, too, and they didn’t say a damn word.”
Poe told his grunts to cut off the ears of the men they killed as proof of their victories in battle. He collected them in a green cellophane bag and, in the summer of 1965, he brought them to the CIA station in Vientiane and dumped them on the deputy chief’s desk. Jim Lilley was the unfortunate recipient. If Tony Poe wanted to shock the new Ivy League big shot, he succeeded.
Lilley had signed up with the CIA fresh out of Yale in 1951. He joined the Far East division and spent the Korean War dropping agents into China and being swindled by Chinese Nationalists. He would go on to serve in Beijing, first as the station chief, then as the American ambassador.
In May 1965, Lilley landed in Laos as deputy chief of station, and when his boss burned out, he became the acting chief. He focused on political warfare in the capital. The CIA’s cash flowed in “as part of our ‘nation building’ effort,” he said, and “we pumped a relatively large amount of money to politicians who would listen to our advice.” The results of the next election for the National Assembly in Laos would show fifty-four out of fifty-seven seats controlled by the CIA’s chosen leaders. But Vientiane was a hard post.
“We saw some of our young guys killed in helicopter crashes,” Lilley remembered. “We had coups d’etat, floods, and all kinds of things to deal with. We saw some of our people crack up who could no longer take it.”
The normal problems of red-blooded Americans posted in a tropical war zone—sex, alcohol, madness—multiplied in Vientiane, most often at a nightclub called the White Rose. Lilley recalled the day that “one of our senior CIA officers briefed a visiting congressional delegation on the secret war up-country. That evening the delegation was taken to the White Rose for exposure to nightlife in Vientiane. Members of the delegation saw a large American man stark naked on the floor of the bar yelling, ‘I want it now!’ A hostess lifted up her skirt and sat on his face. It was the same officer who had briefed the delegation earlier in the day.”
The CIA station fought to identify communist targets in Laos, to pinpoint the footpaths that wove together into the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and to hunt the enemy. “We tried to set up tribal teams,” Lilley said. “They would report very high statistics of North Vietnamese killed, which I think were in part fabricated.” They also spotted targets for American bombing missions. Four times in 1965, the Americans destroyed innocent civilian targets in Laos, once bombing a friendly village that Ambassador Sullivan had blessed with a goodwill visit the day before. The bombing run had been called in by Bill Lair, who was trying to rescue a CIA pilot who had touched down in a hot landing zone and was captured by the Pathet Lao. The bombs fell twenty miles from their intended target; the pilot, Ernie Brace, spent eight years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton.
In June 1965, one of Vang Pao’s best officers was killed by ground fire while standing in the open door of a helicopter trying to find a downed American pilot forty miles inside North Vietnam. In August, an Air America helicopter crashed into the Mekong River outside Vientiane, killing Lewis Ojibway, the CIA’s base chief in northwest Laos, and a Lao army colonel who worked with him. The agency brass carved a star honoring Ojibway into the marble entryway at CIA headquarters. In October, another chopper went down in the jungle near the Cambodian border, killing Mike Deuel and Mike Maloney, two young sons of prominent CIA officers. Two more stars were hewn.
The CIA’s war in Laos had started small, with “a great effervescence, a sense that we had finally found people who would fight the communists and occasionally defeat them in guerrilla warfare,” Lilley said. “It was a sacred war. A good war.”
Then the CIA outpost at Long Tieng started to sprawl: new roads, warehouses, barracks, trucks, jeeps, bulldozers; a bigger airstrip, more flights, more firepower, more air support. The Hmong stopped farming when rice started falling out of the sky from CIA planes. “We increased our personnel, doubling or tripling it,” Lilley said. The newly arriving CIA officers “really looked at Laos as a paramilitary problem. They really had no grounding in the overall situation…. It became a little more like Vietnam. And that’s when
the situation began to slip away from us.”
That moment came in October 1965, when Bill Colby came to Laos and flew up to Long Tieng on an inspection tour. The war in Vietnam was now on full tilt; 184,000 troops were deployed by year’s end. The key to defeating the North still lay on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, where the communists were moving men and materiel into battle faster than the United States could destroy them. Colby was disheartened: the enemy controlled strategic outposts throughout Laos, even on the outskirts of Vientiane.
He wanted a new station chief, a cold-blooded hard-charging commander. The man for the job was Ted Shackley.
“AN EXEMPLARY SUCCESS STORY”
When the call came, Shackley had been the CIA chief in Berlin for less than six months, following a long tour trying to overthrow Castro from Miami. His career had been focused on the Soviets, the Cubans, and the East Germans. He had never been anywhere near Asia. He flew to the Udorn base in Thailand, where American bulldozers were carving up the red-clay earth and camouflaged American jets were revving up for air strikes in Vietnam. Shackley remembered seeing the loaded bomb racks and thinking: “No one was talking theory here.”
He wanted to take the war to the enemy, and he wanted instant results. He started building an empire in the jungle, with Jim Lilley as his deputy chief. They became close friends. Lilley’s portrait of the man—“ambitious, tough-minded, and ruthless”—is telling. “What he was determined to do was to build up the station in Laos and play a critical role in the Vietnam War by hitting the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” Lilley said. “He brought in the paramilitary assets that he had to bear on this key target. He didn’t just sit around. He wanted to win wars.”
Shackley brought in men he trusted from the Miami station and the Berlin base and told them to go out into the provinces, form village militias, and send them out to fight. The militias started out by spying on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and wound up in combat. He opened up new CIA bases all over Laos. The number of CIA officers working for him grew more than sevenfold, from 30 to 250. The Lao paramilitary forces under his command doubled to forty thousand men. He used them as forward air controllers to bring American air power raining down on Laos. By April 1966, twenty-nine CIA roadwatch teams in Southeast Laos were calling in enemy movements on the trail to the CIA base in Udorn, which dispatched American bombers to destroy them.
The U.S. Air Force started pounding the jungles of Laos into wasteland. B-52 bombers went to North Vietnam to destroy the villages and hamlets at the head of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The army and the navy sent commandos to try to break the spine of the trail as it curved back into the South.
Shackley tallied the damage and the body counts. He concluded that his marriage of mountain tribesmen and American military technology had “revolutionized irregular warfare” and “put an essentially new weapon into the hands of American policy makers.” Back in Washington, the president’s men read Shackley’s reports—so many thousands of Lao commandos recruited, so many communists killed per month, so many missions accomplished—and deemed his work “an exemplary success story.” They approved tens of millions of dollars more for the CIA’s war in Laos. Shackley thought he was winning the war. But the communists kept coming down the trail.
“AN ANCHOR LAND IN SOUTHEAST ASIA”
In Thailand, a more tricky political problem confronted the CIA: creating the illusion of democracy.
In 1953, Walter Bedell Smith and the Dulles brothers had sent an extraordinary American ambassador to Bangkok: Wild Bill Donovan. He was seventy years old, but he still had one fight left in him. “Ambassador Donovan recommended to President Eisenhower that they make a stand in Thailand, try to move from there back into some of these countries and to stop this onrush of communism” said Bill Thomas, the ambassador’s chief information officer in Bangkok. “Money was no object.”
Donovan set off a great surge in the CIA’s covert operations throughout Southeast Asia after the Korean War. He was helped by the forty-thousand-strong Thai national police force, whose commander, underwritten by the CIA and Donovan’s embassy, was an opium king. The agency and a rapidly expanding American military assistance group armed and trained the Thai military, whose commander controlled Bangkok’s whorehouses, pork slaughterhouses, and liquor warehouses. Donovan publicly endorsed the Thai generals as defenders of democracy. The agency used its inroads with them to build its base near Udorn. Once a nerve center for covert operations throughout Southeast Asia, after 9/11 it served as a secret prison for the detention and interrogation of Islamic radicals.
Thailand remained under military dictatorship more than a decade after Donovan’s departure. In 1965, under prodding from Washington, the generals proposed to hold elections someday. But they feared the left would rise at the ballot boxes. So the CIA set out to create and control the democratic process.
On September 28, 1965, Helms, covert-ops chief Desmond FitzGerald, and the Far East baron Bill Colby presented the White House with a proposal for “financing of a political party, electoral support for this party, and support for selected candidates for parliament from the party.” Their plans were strongly endorsed by the wily and ambitious American ambassador in Thailand, Graham Martin, who considered the CIA his personal cashbox and constabulary. The problem was a delicate one, they reported. “Thailand today is still under martial law which does not permit political parties” the Thai generals had “done little or nothing to develop and organize politically in preparation for the forthcoming elections.” But under the firm hand of the ambassador and the CIA, they had agreed to join forces and form a new party. In return the CIA would provide millions to create the new political machine.
The goal was to continue “the leadership and control of the present ruling group” and “to ensure that the party created is successful in winning a comfortable and commanding majority in elections.” The agency said it could begin “literally building a democratic electoral process from the ground up,” so that the United States could depend on “a stable pro-Western regime in an anchor land in Southeast Asia.” President Johnson personally approved the plan. The stability of Thailand was essential for an American victory in Vietnam.
“WE ONLY RODE THE WAVES ASHORE”
The CIA had warned the White House that a loss of American influence in Indonesia would make victory in Vietnam meaningless. The agency was working hard to find a new leader for the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
Then, on the night of October 1, 1965, a political earthquake struck. Seven years after the CIA tried to overthrow him, President Sukarno of Indonesia secretly launched what appeared to be a coup against his own government. After two decades in power, Sukarno, his health and his judgment failing, had sought to shore up his rule by allying himself with the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI. The party had grown in strength, winning recruits with ceaseless reminders of the CIA’s assaults on the nation’s sovereignty. It was now the world’s largest communist organization outside Russia and China, with 3.5 million nominal members.
Sukarno’s lurch to the left proved a fatal mistake. At least five generals were assassinated that night, including the army chief of staff. The state-run radio announced that a revolutionary council had taken over to protect the president and the nation from the CIA.
The station in Jakarta had few friends within the army or the government. It had precisely one well-situated agent: Adam Malik, a forty-eight-year-old disillusioned ex-Marxist who had served as Sukarno’s ambassador to Moscow and his minister of trade.
After a permanent falling-out with his president in 1964, Malik had met up with the CIA’s Clyde McAvoy at a Jakarta safe house. McAvoy was the covert operator who a decade before had helped recruit the future prime minister of Japan, and he had come to Indonesia with orders to penetrate the PKI and the Sukarno government.
“I recruited and ran Adam Malik,” McAvoy said in an interview in 2005. “He was the highest-ranking Indonesian we ever recruited.” A mutual friend had introduced t
hem, vouching for McAvoy; the go-between was a Japanese businessman in Jakarta and a former member of Japan’s communist party. After Malik’s recruitment, the CIA won approval for a stepped-up program of covert action to drive a political wedge between the left and the right in Indonesia.
Then, in a few terrifying weeks in October 1965, the Indonesian state split in two.
The CIA worked to consolidate a shadow government, a troika composed of Adam Malik, the ruling sultan of central Java, and an army major general named Suharto. Malik used his relationship with the CIA to set up a series of secret meetings with the new American ambassador in Indonesia, Marshall Green. The ambassador said he met Adam Malik “in a clandestine setting” and obtained “a very clear idea of what Suharto thought and what Malik thought and what they were proposing to do” to rid Indonesia of communism through the new political movement they led, the Kap-Gestapu.
“I ordered that all 14 of the walkie-talkies we had in the Embassy for emergency communications be handed over to Suharto,” Ambassador Green said. “This provided additional internal security for him and his own top officers”—and a way for the CIA to monitor what they were doing. “I reported this to Washington and received a most gratifying telegram back from Bill Bundy,” the assistant secretary of state for the Far East, and Green’s good friend of thirty years from their days together at Groton.
In mid-October 1965, Malik sent an aide to the home of the American embassy’s senior political officer, Bob Martens, who had served in Moscow while Malik was the Indonesian envoy. Martens gave the emissary an unclassified list of sixty-seven PKI leaders, a roster he had compiled out of communist press clippings. “It was certainly not a death list,” Martens said. “It was a means for the non-communists that were basically fighting for their lives—remember, the outcome of a life-and-death struggle between the communists and non-communists was still in doubt—to know the organization of the other side.” Two weeks later, Ambassador Green and the CIA station chief in Jakarta, Hugh Tovar, began receiving secondhand reports of killings and atrocities in eastern and central Java, where thousands of people were being slaughtered by civilian shock troops with the blessings of General Suharto.
