Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  IBEC’s Thaibec Investment Service steered investors toward Thai opportunities for profits, including IBEC’s own associated companies: Star of Siam, Silk of Siam, and Arbor Acres Thailand. IBEC’s Chicago-based insurance firm, ROLIBEC, had moved into IBEC’s office in Bangkok in 1961 and used its Thai subsidiary to score commissions as general agents for reinsurance and life insurance companies doing business in the Pacific Rim countries. ROLIBEC provided in-house insurance for these IBEC firms, as well as for the Rockefeller Foundation and such U.S. financed nonprofit and international agencies as Planned Parenthood and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. Its corporate clients included some of the largest American companies doing business in Thailand: Shell Oil, Colgate Palmolive, Kraft Paper, Eli Lilly, Upjohn, IBM, John Deere, 3M Corporation, and Far East Mining. Using Bangkok as the regional base, ROLIBEC made “quite handsome profits” between 1967 and 1971 by tripling its portfolio in Japan and writing off over 50 percent of the purchase price as “goodwill.”2

  ROLIBEC expanded into Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo and Yokohama, and Vientiane (Laos). It was also a war profiteer, “Vietnam business”3 generating much of its income. Its clients included Bird & Sons,4 which flew supplies from Thailand to the CIA’s Hmong army in Laos, supplementing the CIA’s Air America, which also was a ROLIBEC client.5

  By 1971, when the vice president of ROLIBEC had hopeful words for the Thai generals who had overthrown the government (“There is sort of an air of expectancy … as many people believe that the generals mean business.… We can be mildly optimistic”),6 IBEC would be using the guaranty of the State Department’s taxpayer-funded Overseas Private Investment Corporation to insure its poultry farms in Thailand against possible losses.

  Nelson was aware of the economic stake. As far back as his involvement in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, the United States was interested in Southeast Asia. Eisenhower had justified U.S. support for France’s efforts to hold on to her colonies as “the cheapest way that we can … to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indochinese territory and from Southeast Asia.”7

  Vietnam was “the controlling hub,” as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles put it, of an area rich in tin, tungsten, oil, rubber, and iron ore. As communist-led nationalist revolutions against Western domination spread from China into Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, the war in South Vietnam became a war for the entire Southeast Asian mainland. In this war, Thailand was not only a staging base for attacks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and North Vietnam; it was also Southeast Asia’s industrial heartland, the hydroelectric foundation for the development of the entire 236,000-square-mile Mekong River Basin, and the strategic gateway below the Himalayas to Burma and ultimately to the jewel of the former British Empire, India.

  By 1967, the war had made Thailand, the largest Southeast Asian country, host to U.S. bombers, 20,000 U.S. troops, and teams of Green Berets and CIA officers. It also hosted the largest U.S. corporate investment in the region. Thailand had become the Brazil of Southeast Asia. U.S. mining and hydroelectric projects in Thailand were financed by such banks as David Rockefeller’s Chase. The country’s giant Mekong River had become the object of vast development schemes, rivaled in the Third World only by those proposed for the Amazon.

  Calvin Thielman, who knew the president of the United States, understood why a Texas politician like Lyndon Johnson could not bend to Ho Chi Minh. The war was simply a test of wills. On one side stood all that seemed righteous: a Christian, Bible-quoting fellow Southerner leading the Western world’s superpower in defense of a beleaguered ally. On the other side hid the hordes of Satan, stalking the jungle to murder and frighten peasants into submission, all directed by the inscrutable Ho hundreds of miles to the north, who, in turn, was controlled by other Evil Emperors thousands of miles away in Peking and Moscow. There was no wondering why Vietnamese peasants should be willing to take on such incredible odds against so powerful an enemy as America and to suffer and die, simply because someone hundreds of miles away ordered them to do so: communist brainwashing techniques were legend. There were also the lack of the Western respect for human life and the fatalism of the Asian mind, both alleged traits long detected by Western scholars and missionaries. It was all so Oriental, so difficult for the Calvinist folks back home to understand, so different from what Rev. Thielman’s congregation could feel: a patriotic outrage against foreign intrigue and threatened conquest of the “little guy” who, being a member of our “free world,” was—as Lansdale said of Magsaysay—“our guy.”

  Some Protestant missionaries felt little hesitation about describing the war as a great “opportunity” to harvest souls for the Lord, giving out gospel readings to grim-faced Vietnamese draftees at Saigon’s induction center. After his first visit to Vietnam, in 1965, Thielman told a reporter that “some of our military people are almost like missionaries,” and the missionaries were almost like the military. “I talked with twenty-one missionaries—Catholic and Protestant—out there. Not one of them thought we should withdraw.”8

  Nothing he saw two years later changed his mind. “I spoke in free conversation (with no military personnel present) with approximately 50 missionaries of at least a dozen religious groups in Vietnam and Thailand,” he reported to President Johnson on his return. “I found no missionary who felt we should pull out of Vietnam.”9 The communist-led NLF had to be defeated.

  Johnson’s intensified bombing of North Vietnam was another matter. During his visits to U.S. Civic Action projects among the hill tribes, Thielman found missionaries and “at least three colonels engaged in pacification … who felt the bombing was an error and should be phased out.”10 More troops should be sent instead, the colonels advised.

  This was the kind of advice Johnson’s top White House advisers did not want to hear, and it went nowhere but to the files. A condition of Thielman’s visit was that there should be no advance publicity. To ensure that there were no leaks, the White House refused Thielman’s request to take Cam Townsend along to help him study the effectiveness of AID’s literacy work among the Montagnards.11

  Cam’s reservations about sending SIL recruits to Vietnam dated back to 1962, when Christian and Missionary Alliance missionaries were seized by NLF soldiers after defying a warning not to repair a bridge the NLF had burned. Around the same time, a Central Highlands village housing an SIL team, Hank and Evangeline Blood, came under Viet Cong attack for a second time.12 The Bloods had been away, but the NLF had come looking for them, perhaps mistaking them for U.S. government “advisers” or believing that they were part of the American intervention symbolized by the Green Beret fort forty miles away at Banmethuot.

  But the Cold War momentum sweeping Americans toward their destiny in Vietnam was too great to resist. By 1963, SIL’s Fundamentalist affiliate, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, had 125 missionaries in twenty cities and villages in South Vietnam; SIL, with 41 translators, was right behind, working among fourteen tribes. That year SIL suffered its first violent deaths since Cam founded the organization thirty years earlier. Two SIL families were caught in a crossfire when the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN) came upon armed black-pajama-clad peasants of the NLF conducting a roadblock and search for medicine. Two SIL men and one child were killed.

  Cam eulogized the missionaries as “Wycliffe’s first martyrs: We believe that a host of new recruits will pick up the task that fell from the limp hands of our martyred colleagues.” Yet he was uneasy. The Cold War that had propelled SIL’s expansion was now extracting a price in blood.

  Cam used the deaths to encourage recruitment for the new Colombian and West African mission fields, not for Vietnam.13 However, SIL’s enthusiastic leader in Vietnam, Hank Blood, wanted more recruits. Cam responded, “I don’t feel that I should put pressure on recruits to go to a certain field.”14

  He did not have to. Billy Graham’s and Calvin Thielman’s championing of the Indochina mission fields was accomplishing more for Hank Blood’s cause t
han anything Cam could have done. SIL’s former top pilot, Larry Montgomery, also was providing the CIA’s Casirio “Chick” Barquin, the Agency’s top air operations officer and liaison with the Helio Aircraft Corporation, with the names of key officials of the Missionary Aviation Fellowship (including his old friend, director Betty Greene) and the director of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Vientiane, Rev. T. J. Andrianoff, in 1964, during the time that the CIA was building its secret army in Laos.15

  In 1967, as B-52s carpet-bombed North Vietnamese villages and rumors abounded in South Vietnam of massacres of civilians in rice paddies and as millions of Americans found it increasingly difficult to accept “His will” as coming from the Prince of Peace, SIL signed its first bilingual education contract with the Saigon regime and USAID’s Office of Education. AID provided the money—more than $160,000—and CIA-directed Montagnard “Rural Reconnaissance Patrols” assisted by Green Berets provided the protection. From the seventeen tribal groups it eventually “occupied,” SIL recruited and trained some 800 Montagnard teachers.16 In March, workshops for the Highlander Education Project were held in four local languages. SIL helped set up the Linguistic Circle of Saigon, just as it had done in Mexico decades earlier. To aid the war effort more directly, SIL also provided information on these same tribes to the U.S. Marines for compilation into a “trans-cultural” area handbook on Montagnard cultures.17

  Just how deeply SIL had become involved in the war was revealed in 1968 by National Geographic magazine. Howard Sochurek was a veteran reporter who had written favorable accounts of the war in 1964 and 1965.18

  On his 1967 trip, Sochurek had a guide: Patrick Cohen, SIL’s translator among the Jeh tribesmen. To the journalist, Cohen was living “in the great Christian missionary tradition that in Vietnam goes back to January 18, 1615, when Father Francesco Buzomi, a Neapolitan, landed in Hue.” Confounded by animism, the European Catholics found a little better luck among the Vietnamese along the coastal lowlands. But in 1967, with the influx of American guns, medicine, and food to fight the holy war, the highland tribes experienced an unprecedented fervor for the Protestant God brought by the Americans. The Christian and Missionary Alliance built churches, SIL supplied translations of the Bible, and AID supplied the food and farming techniques. And the Green Berets provided the training that turned young tribesmen into “strikers” (the name the CIA gave to the CIDGs, the Civil Irregular Defense Groups). “They tried to break up infiltration routes from North Vietnam,”19 a U.S. helicopter crewman explained. To boost morale, the Green Berets composed a marching song for strikers from the village of An Loc that was sung to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Still, the U.S. command at An Loc estimated that one local village’s Viet Cong sympathies were probably as high as 25 percent.20

  And the NLF forces around An Loc continued to grow, led by a Montagnard tribesman who was reported to be a major general in the North Vietnamese army. The NLF promised the Montagnards a degree of autonomy in postwar Vietnam. The Saigon regime, in contrast, had been jailing the leaders of the Montagnard autonomy movement since 1958. After ruthlessly suppressing Montagnard revolts in 1964 and 1965, the regime hastily redrafted its constitution to grant Montagnard representation in an all but impotent legislature. But the constitution and a decree promising the tribes land titles remained little more than paper. The regime offered only absorption into a South Vietnam ruled by a military clique and bloodshed in a CIA-directed war.

  As the Montagnards’ manhood was marched into the holocaust, their replacements became younger and younger. By 1967, Sochurek found boys under arms, “the proud possessors of transistor radios and aspirin tablets.”21 They were paid $12.71 a month. This was a cheap war for the CIA. It would continue despite enormous losses and long after the realization that the CIA’s Montagnard army could not win.

  Cam’s translators, of course, did not see it that way. They were true believers in the war, as well as in the Word. They listened appreciatively to the American officials who explained the Montagnards’ place in God’s celestial plan: “Because they occupy a strategic position on the outer rim of China, they have an influence on the balance of power in Asia between China and the Western World. They most certainly can upset that balance in spite of their backwardness.”22

  And, after all, as Walt Rostow argued in the White House, was not China behind the Viet Cong and the Soviet Union, in turn, behind China?

  To lift tribes out of such backwardness with the Light of the Word had always been SIL’s mission. Why should Vietnam be any different? The Saigon government wanted SIL, the U.S. government wanted SIL, and so God must want SIL. The Montagnards, almost 2 million people in villages strung across 1,500 miles of mountains stretching from South Vietnam to the Himalayas, waited for deliverance from Satan.

  Tribes “Occupied” by SIL During Vietnam War

  Sources: Nguyen Ngoc Bich, An Annotated Atlas of the Republic of Viet-nam (Washington, D.C.: Embassy of Viet-Nam, 1972), p. 40; Gerald C. Hickey, The Highland People of South Vietnam: Social and Economic Development (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corporation, 1967), p. xv; Marilyn Gregerson et al., Tales from Indochina (Dallas: International Museum of Cultures, 1987); Bibliography of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Volume One: 1935–1975 (Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1979).

  They constituted 15 percent of the population of South Vietnam, 50 percent of the population of Laos, and 20 percent of the population of Burma. More important to the CIA devisers of the Montagnard “trip-wire” strategy to foil communist infiltration from the north was the land these tribes occupied: half of Burma, four-fifths of Laos, two-thirds of South Vietnam, and a good chunk of northeastern Cambodia.

  Thailand, too, had hill tribes numbering some 200,000 people. Previously ignored by the U.S.-backed government in Bangkok, the tribes became important by 1967, when U.S. warplanes were flying daily out of some of the world’s newest and largest air bases in Thailand. The largest base was in northeastern Thailand at Udorn, where the CIA had a huge helicopter, Helio, and DC-3 base-within-a-base to support its secret war in Laos.

  The Udorn air base gave the surrounding area a priority in 1967 for Rockefeller funding of a study done in collaboration with the Rural Affairs Division of the United States Operation Mission (USOM) in Thailand. The study was conducted by Michigan State University’s Nicolaas G. M. Luykx II (head of MSU’s Pakistan Project), at the request of Clifton R. Wharton, director of the American Universities Research Program of John 3rd’s Agricultural Development Council;23 it involved interviews with regional and local government officials and village leaders to gather impressions on how well the Thai military regime’s American-advised development projects and government infrastructure were progressing and how they were regarded by the local villagers.24 As a Cornell graduate student, Luykx had done a similar Rockefeller-funded study of local government effectiveness in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand in 1956, the year Diem proclaimed the independence of South Vietnam; Wharton called this new study “Udorn Revisited.” The largest change, of course, was the presence of thousands of Americans and the economic domination of the area by the huge U.S. air base. But for many villagers, poverty remained, and the new American presence was symbolized by the constant procession of giant Air Force bombers roaring their domination of the skies to oxen and farmer alike.

  The warplanes headed northeast, their mission to bomb Laos and North Vietnam. They were guided by the CIA’s mountaintop directional beacons that were strung across Thailand and Laos’s tribal highlands. In Laos, as the CIA’s secret army of the Hmong tribesmen retreated steadily west toward the Thai border, Thai troops were being called into the fight in Laos’s poppy-growing highlands. They were part of a strategy that relied on tribes that were financed partly by the opium trade.

  It was then that the government in Bangkok suddenly took an interest in the schooling of Thailand’s own mountain tribes. Assisted by the Asia Foundation (which had origins as a CIA conduit), the U.S. I
nformation Agency, and the USOM, eleven Protestant missionary groups and several Catholic orders joined programs sponsored by the regime. These programs included civic action carried out by the Thai Border Patrol Police,25 the very police organization that was involved in illegal opium smuggling.26

  Unknown to the missionaries, the Border Patrol Police and Thailand’s hill tribes were being drawn into a financial web27 with threads that stretched back to the CIA station in Miami—the same station that recruited the Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion.

  At Chiang Mai, northern Thailand’s most important trade center, the CIA set up one of its largest stations. AID’s Accelerated Rural Development program in Thailand built roads, but the roads became more of a boon for heroin smugglers than for the Thai army, whose clumsy armored units found the highlands rough going. Thailand’s largest tribe, the Lahu, and another large tribe, the Yao, had followed William and Harold Young, Baptist missionaries turned CIA agents,28 in cross-border raids from Burma into China, the supposed evil force behind the revolution in South Vietnam. They reported by radio to a third missionary, Harold’s son Gordon Young, who translated their reports and turned them over to the CIA chief of station, who doubled as the U.S. vice consul in Chiang Mai. To supply the Lahu warriors with arms without risking American helicopters so deep in enemy territory, the CIA struck deals with Shan tribal rebels in Burma. The Shan ran opium caravans southeast to Thailand and Laos and returned with weapons. A few extra weapons for CIA’s Lahu strike forces along the Burma-China border could easily be accommodated in these caravans. Like the Shan, the Lahu were a dispersed people. They grew poppies as their principal cash crop and were involved in the opium trade.