by Tim Weiner
McGeorge Bundy and his brother Bill resolved that Suharto and the Kap-Gestapu deserved American support. Ambassador Green warned them that the aid could not come through the Pentagon or the State Department. It could not be successfully concealed; the political risks were too great. The three old Grotonians—the ambassador, the national security adviser, and the assistant secretary of state for the Far East—agreed that the money had to be handled by the CIA.
They agreed to support the Indonesian army in the form of $500,000 of medical supplies to be shipped through the CIA, with the understanding that the army would sell the goods for cash, and provisionally approved a shipment of sophisticated communications equipment to Indonesian army leaders. Ambassador Green, after conferring with the CIA’s Hugh Tovar, sent a cable to Bill Bundy recommending a substantial payment for Adam Malik:
This is to confirm my earlier concurrence that we provide Malik with fifty million rupiahs [roughly $10,000] for the activities of the Kap-Gestapu movement. This army-inspired but civilian-staffed action group is still carrying burden of current repressive efforts…. Our willingness to assist him in this manner will, I think, represent in Malik’s mind our endorsement of his present role in the army’s anti-PKI efforts, and will promote good cooperating relations between him and the army. The chances of detection or subsequent revelation of our support in this instance are as minimal as any black bag operation can be.
A great wave of violence began rising in Indonesia. General Suharto and the Kap-Gestapu massacred a multitude. Ambassador Green later told Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, in a conversation at the vice president’s office in the U.S. Capitol, that “300,000 to 400,000 people were slain” in “a blood bath.” The vice president mentioned that he had known Adam Malik for many years, and the ambassador praised him as “one of the cleverest men he had ever met.” Malik was installed as foreign minister, and he was invited to spend twenty minutes with the president of the United States in the Oval Office. They spent most of their time talking about Vietnam. At the end of their discussion, Lyndon Johnson said he was watching developments in Indonesia with the greatest interest, and he extended his best wishes to Malik and Suharto. With the backing of the United States, Malik later served as the president of the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Ambassador Green revised his guess of the death toll in Indonesia in a secret session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I think we would up that estimate to perhaps close to 500,000 people,” he said in testimony declassified in March 2007. “Of course, nobody knows. We merely judge it by whole villages that have been depopulated.”
The chairman, Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, put the next question simply and directly.
“We were involved in the coup?” he asked.
“No, sir,” said Ambassador Green.
“Were we involved in the previous attempt at a coup?” said the senator.
“No,” said the ambassador. “I don’t think so.”
“CIA played no part in it?” asked Fulbright.
“You mean 1958?” said Green. The agency had run that coup, of course, from the bungled beginning to the bitter end. “I am afraid I cannot answer,” the ambassador said. “I don’t know for sure what happened.”
A perilous moment, veering close to the edge of a disastrous operation and its deadly consequences—but the senator let it pass. “You don’t know whether CIA was involved or not,” Fulbright said. “And we were not involved in this coup.”
“No sir,” said the ambassador. “Definitely not.”
More than one million political prisoners were jailed by the new regime. Some stayed in prison for decades. Some died there. Indonesia remained a military dictatorship for the rest of the cold war. The consequences of the repression resound to this day.
The United States has denied for forty years that it had anything to do with the slaughter carried out in the name of anticommunism in Indonesia. “We didn’t create the waves,” said Marshall Green. “We only rode the waves ashore.”
“GENUINELY AND DEEPLY TROUBLED”
Twenty years earlier, Frank Wisner and Richard Helms had left Berlin together and flown to Washington, wondering if there would ever be a Central Intelligence Agency. Both had risen to lead the clandestine service. Now one was about to attain the pinnacle of power. The other had fallen into the abyss.
For months on end, Frank Wisner had been brooding in his lovely house in Georgetown, drinking from cut-glass tumblers filled with whisky, in a dark despair. Among the CIA’s more closely held secrets was that one of its founding fathers had been in and out of the madhouse for years. Wisner had been removed as chief of station in London and forced to retire after his mental illness overtook him once again in 1962. He had been raving about Adolf Hitler, seeing things, hearing voices. He knew he would never be well. On October 29, 1965, Wisner had a date to go hunting at his estate on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with an old CIA friend, Joe Bryan. That afternoon, Wisner went up to his country house, took down a shotgun, and blew off his head. He was fifty-six years old. His funeral at the National Cathedral was magnificent. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, and his gravestone said: “Lieutenant, United States Navy.”
The cold-war esprit de corps was starting to erode. Only a few weeks after Wisner was laid to rest, Ray Cline, the deputy director of intelligence, went to Clark Clifford, the chairman of the president’s intelligence advisory board, and cut Red Raborn’s throat.
Cline warned that the director was a danger to the nation. On January 25, 1966, Clifford told McGeorge Bundy, who was ready to quit after five exhausting years as national security adviser, that the intelligence board was “genuinely and deeply troubled about the leadership problem in CIA.” A few days later a well-placed leak to the Washington Star let Raborn know he was on his way out. The admiral fought back. He sent a long list of his accomplishments to the president’s aide Bill Moyers: the agency had weeded out stale and unproductive covert actions, installed a twenty-four-hour operations center to feed news and information to the president, doubled the strength of the counterterror teams in Vietnam, and tripled its overall effort in Saigon. He assured the White House that morale was great at headquarters and abroad. On the morning of February 22, 1966, President Johnson read Admiral Raborn’s glowing self-assessment, picked up the phone, and called McGeorge Bundy.
Raborn was “totally oblivious to the fact that he is not highly regarded and he is not doing a good job,” the president said. “He thinks that he’s made a great improvement and he’s a great success. And I’m afraid Helms lets him think that.”
LBJ placed no one in charge of the covert-action review board, known as the 303 Committee, after Bundy resigned that week. Operations that needed White House attention hung in abeyance, including a plan to fix the elections in the Dominican Republic in favor of an exiled former president living in New York, and a fresh infusion of cash and weapons for the dictator of the Congo. Johnson left the chair empty through March and April 1966. At first he wanted Bill Moyers—later in life the most lucid leftist voice of public television—to take charge of the 303 Committee. Moyers attended one meeting on May 5, 1966, shuddered, and declined the honor. The president settled instead on his most loyal yea-sayer, Walt Whitman Rostow, as the new national security adviser and 303 chairman. The committee got back to work in May. Despite the lull, it approved fifty-four major CIA covert operations that year, most of them in support of the war in Southeast Asia.
Finally, on the third Saturday of June 1966, the White House operator placed a call from the president to the home of Richard Helms.
Fifty-three, graying, trim from tennis, wound up like a Swiss watch, Helms drove his old black Cadillac to headquarters each morning at six-thirty, Saturdays included; this was a rare day off. What began for him as a wartime romance with secret intelligence had become an all-consuming passion. His marriage of twenty-seven years to Julia Shields, a sculptor six years older, was dying from inattentio
n. Their son was off at college. His life was entirely devoted to the agency. When he answered the ringing phone, he heard his greatest wish fulfilled.
His swearing-in took place at the White House on June 30. The president brought in the Marine Band to perform. Helms now commanded close to twenty thousand people, more than a third of them spying overseas, and a budget of about a billion dollars. He was perceived as one of the most powerful men in Washington.
25. “WE KNEW THEN
THAT WE COULD NOT WIN
THE WAR”
A quarter of a million American soldiers were at war when Richard Helms took control at the CIA. One thousand covert operators in Southeast Asia and three thousand intelligence analysts at home were consumed by the growing disaster.
A battle was building at headquarters. The job of the analysts was to judge whether the war could be won. The job of the clandestine service was to help win it. Most analysts were pessimists; most operators were gung-ho. They worked in different worlds; armed guards stood between the directorates at headquarters. Helms felt he was “a circus rider standing astride two horses, each for the best of reasons going its own way.”
One of the hundreds of new CIA recruits who arrived for work the summer that Helms took power was a twenty-three-year-old who had signed up on a lark, looking for a free trip to Washington during his senior year at Indiana University. Bob Gates, the future director of central intelligence and secretary of defense, rode an agency bus from downtown Washington into a driveway surrounded by a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. He entered a forbidding seven-story concrete slab topped with antennas.
“The inside of the building was deceptively bland,” he remembered. “Long, undecorated hallways. Tiny cubicles to work in. Linoleum floors. Metal, government-issue furniture. It was like a giant insurance company. But, then again, it wasn’t.” The CIA made Gates a ninety-day wonder, an instant second lieutenant, and sent him off to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to learn the science of nuclear targeting. From there the fledgling CIA analyst caught a chilling glimpse of the course of the war in Vietnam: the United States was running out of pilots, and white-haired colonels were being sent off to bomb the communists.
“We knew then,” Gates remembered, “that we could not win the war.”
“CIRCLE NOW SQUARED”
Helms and his Far East chief, Bill Colby, were career covert operators, and their reports to the president reflected the can-do spirit of the old clandestine service. Helms told LBJ, “This Agency is going flat out in its effort to contribute to the success of the total U.S. program in Vietnam.” Colby sent the White House a glowing assessment of the CIA’s Saigon station. While “the war is by no means over,” he reported, “my Soviet or Chinese counterpart’s report must exhibit great concern over the Viet Cong’s mounting problems and the steady improvement in the ability of both the South Vietnamese and the Americans to fight a people’s war.” George Carver, whom Helms had chosen as his special assistant for Vietnamese affairs, was also a constant bearer of glad tidings for the White House.
Yet the CIA’s best analysts had concluded in a book-length study, The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist, sent to the president and perhaps a dozen top aides, that nothing the United States was doing could defeat the enemy. When Secretary of Defense McNamara read that report on August 26, 1966, he immediately called Helms and asked to see the CIA’s ranking expert on Vietnam. As it happened, Carver was on vacation that week. So his deputy, George Allen, was summoned to the inner sanctum of the Pentagon for his first and only one-on-one talk with the secretary of defense. He was scheduled for a half hour at 10:30 a.m. The conversation turned out to be the only true meeting of the minds of the CIA and the Pentagon during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.
McNamara was fascinated to learn that Allen had spent seventeen years working on Vietnam. He did not know there was anyone who had devoted himself to the struggle for so long. Well, he said, you must have some ideas about what to do. “He wanted to know what I would do if I were sitting in his place,” Allen remembered. “I decided to respond candidly.”
“Stop the buildup of American forces,” he said. “Halt the bombing of the North, and negotiate a cease-fire with Hanoi.” McNamara called his secretary and told her to cancel the rest of his appointments until after lunch.
Why, the secretary of defense asked, would the United States choose to let the dominoes of Asia fall? Allen replied that the risk was no greater at the peace table than in the theater of war. If the United States stopped the bombing and started negotiating with China and the Soviet Union, as well as its Asian allies and enemies, there might be peace with honor.
After ninety minutes of this riveting heresy, McNamara made three fateful decisions. He asked the CIA to compile an order of battle, an estimate of the enemy forces arrayed against the United States. He told his aides to begin to compile a top secret history of the war since 1954—the Pentagon Papers. And he questioned what he was doing in Vietnam. On September 19, McNamara telephoned the president: “I myself am more and more convinced that we ought definitely to plan on termination of bombing in the North,” he said. “I think also we ought to be planning, as I mentioned before, on a ceiling on our force levels. I don’t think we ought to just look ahead to the future and say we’re going to go higher and higher and higher and higher—six hundred thousand, seven hundred thousand, whatever it takes.” The president’s only response was an unintelligible grunt.
McNamara came to understand, too late, that the United States had dramatically underestimated the strength of the insurgents killing American soldiers in Vietnam, a fatal mistake that would be repeated many years later in Iraq. The order of battle study he commissioned set off a great struggle between the military commanders in Saigon and the CIA analysts at headquarters. Did the United States face a total of fewer than 300,000 communist fighters in Vietnam, as the military maintained, or more than 500,000, as most of the analysts believed?
The difference lay in the number of guerrillas, irregulars, militiamen—soldiers without uniforms. If the enemy stood half a million strong after two years of relentless bombings by American planes and intense attacks by American troops, it would be a sign that the war really could not be won. The lowball figure was an article of faith for General William West-moreland, the American military commander in South Vietnam, and his aide, Robert Komer. Known as “Blowtorch Bob,” Komer was a charter member of the CIA who ran Westmoreland’s new and rapidly expanding counterinsurgency campaign, code-named Phoenix. He consistently sent eyes-only memos to LBJ saying victory was at hand. The real question, he asserted, was not whether we were winning, but how fast we wanted to win.
The argument went back and forth for months. Finally, Helms sent Carver out to Saigon to deal with Westmoreland and Komer. Their talks did not go well. The military was stonewalling. On September 11, 1967, the argument came to a head.
“You guys simply have to back off,” Komer told Carver in an hour-long monologue over dinner. The truth would “create a public disaster and undo everything we’ve been trying to accomplish out here.” Carver sent a cable to Helms saying the military would not be swayed. They had to prove that they were winning. They had underscored “their frustrating inability to convince the press (hence the public) of the great progress being made, and the paramount importance of saying nothing that would detract from the image of progress,” Carver reported to the director. Quantifying the number of Vietcong irregulars in South Vietnam “would produce a politically unacceptable total of over 400,000.” Since the military had “a pre-determined total, fixed on public-relations grounds, we can go no further (unless you instruct otherwise).”
Helms felt a crushing pressure to get on the team—and to trim the CIA’s reporting to fit the president’s policy. He caved in. He said the number “didn’t mean a damn.” The agency officially accepted the falsified figure of 299,000 enemy forces or fewer. “Circle now squared,” Carver cabled back to the director.
The suppression and falsification of reporting on Vietnam had a long history. In the spring of 1963, John McCone had come under enormous pressure from the Pentagon to scuttle a pessimistic estimate that cited “very great weaknesses” in the government of South Vietnam—including poor morale among the troops, terrible intelligence, and communist penetration of the military. The CIA rewrote that estimate to read: “We believe that Communist progress has been blunted and that the situation is improving.” The CIA did not believe that. A few weeks later came the riots in Hue, followed by the burning Buddhists, and the plotting to do away with Diem.
The pressure never stopped; the president’s new national security adviser, Walt Rostow, constantly ordered the CIA to produce good news about the war for the White House. Whose side are you on, anyway? Rostow growled. But on the same day that Helms squared the circle, he also sent a brutally honest CIA study to the president. “The attached paper is sensitive, particularly if its existence were to leak,” Helms’s letter to the president began. “It has not been given, and will not be given, to any other official of the Government.” The very title of the report—“Implications of an Unfavorable Outcome in Vietnam”—was explosive. “The compelling proposition,” it said, was that “the U.S., acting within the constraints imposed by its traditions and public attitudes, cannot crush a revolutionary movement which is sufficiently large, dedicated, competent, and well-supported…. The structure of U.S. military power is ill-suited to cope with guerrilla warfare waged by a determined, resourceful, and politically astute opponent. This is not a novel discovery.”
