by Gerard Colby
Yet the missionaries kept their silence. Only the sheer ferocity of U.S. military operations in Southeast Asia forced Americans publicly to raise questions about what was happening in Chiang Mai.29
DEPOLITICIZING POLITICAL SURVEILLANCE
Nestled in the mountains of northern Thailand, Chiang Mai gave Americans stationed there a welcome relief from hot, humid Bangkok. Thais had been noticing an increasing number of Americans arriving in Chiang Mai since 1962, when CIA missionary William Young began his Lahu raids into Laos, as well as China. Chiang Mai’s status as the last rail terminal in northern Thailand ensured its growth into a bustling little city with even a new university. But there was an older trade, opium. By 1967, competition for the opium trade forced the CIA-allied Chinese Nationalist exiles, who had dominated the trade since 1947, to intervene.
Thai troops now flooded Chiang Mai to defend the north from the CIA allies they had always known were there. They were also there to back up “communist suppression operations” along the Laos border, where indiscriminate napalm bombing and massacres had provoked Hmong tribesmen to revolt. To supplement the widening counterinsurgency operations, the Lahu were again called up in the hills, along with draftees from Thailand’s two other poppy-growing tribes, the Akha and the Lisu.
This was the backdrop for the CIA’s and Pentagon’s interest in the hill tribes of Thailand and in Chiang Mai as the base of operations for studying them. At stake were not only the air strikes launched against Hanoi from bases in northeastern Thailand, but the opium trade that paid for many of the arms used by the CIA’s tribal and military allies in Southeast Asia’s opium corridor. The opium trade moved southeast from Burma, through Thailand and Laos, and into South Vietnam, bringing money, corruption, addiction, and weapons. The lands it passed through were tribal lands, poor and potentially revolutionary, all of them requiring the careful collection of intelligence, all of them remote yet requiring constant surveillance.
Resting in the cool mountain air above the Ping River, Chiang Mai, with only 75,000 people, was famous for its old houses made of teak from nearby forests. It also sported four new hotels to accommodate throngs of tourists, who were attracted by the local tribal crafts. Beyond these mostly Hmong hamlets, deeper in the mountains, dwelled tribes whose isolation was seen as a breeding ground for subversion and revolution. To correct that situation, and to efficiently exploit the tungsten, manganese, and fluorspar lodes in the mountains south of Chiang Mai,30 the regime was rushing an Accelerated Rural Development program to tie Bangkok to the backlands with modern roads built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Lyndon Johnson had descended on Thailand in Air Force One in 1966 to seal an accord that gave him six air bases to bomb North Vietnam; in exchange, he pledged money, arms, and technical assistance. “Technical assistance” was a catchall; it included arms, as well as the Tribal Research Center in Chiang Mai, engineers, as well as anthropologists and linguists.
In the name of the United States and the Cold War, AID and Pentagon grants were given to discover why people in foreign lands were willing to join guerrilla groups and risk their lives, what local “sociopolitical structure and dynamics as well as the aspect of leadership resources would be of significance to military operations,”31 and how ethnic minorities could be mobilized instead to support U.S. intervention. Subsequent investigation by the American Anthropological Association’s Ethics Committee uncovered the fact that anthropologists had been given a priority in the project precisely because their work required them to know the area and win the trust of its people. Social scientists soon began churning out studies on the hill tribes of Southeast Asia, extending their usefulness to the American war effort. “Minority Groups in the Republic of Vietnam,” for instance, was completed in 1966 by the Pentagon-funded Center for Research in Social Sciences (CRESS)32 of American University, the same group that did similar studies for the Pentagon in Latin America.*
Tribal peoples became the focus of yet another social science think tank in northern Virginia called the Research Analysis Corp., whose studies included “The Mobilization and Utilization of Minority Groups for Counterinsurgency”; “Brief Notes on the Tahoi, Pocoh and Phuong Tribes of the Republic of Vietnam”; “The Customs and Taboos of Selected Tribes Residing Along the Western [Cambodian and Laotian] Borders of the Republic of Vietnam”;33 and “The Major Ethnic Groups of the South Vietnamese Highlands” and their “settlement pattern, social organization, and religious practices.”34
The study on “Mobilization and Utilization of Minority Groups for Counterinsurgency” could have offered SIL’s Dale Kietzman a few lessons on what the Pentagon and the CIA were looking for, assuming that a knowledge of CIA misuse of anthropological and linguistic data might have persuaded Kietzman to be less enthusiastic about identifying “potentially hostile” tribes and their locations on a map of the Brazilian Amazon. The Pentagon-funded study’s stated concern was to target those tribal groups judged susceptible to “subversion in future communist wars of ‘national liberation’” because of (1) the “history of hostility between them and the dominant ethnic group; (2) their location in remote areas and consequently their lack of close contact with the national government and its representatives; (3) the fact that they occupy terrain of strategic importance both to insurgent and government forces; or (4) a combination of these reasons.”35
World War II’s legacy of the social sciences at the service of political power, pioneered in the cultural and intelligence operations of Nelson Rockefeller’s CIAA, had come to full, horrifying bloom.
In the summer of 1967, the Pentagon-sponsored Jason Division of the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) convened a Thailand Study Group to see how it could quietly enlist the aid of academics in counterinsurgency without causing a scandal like Project Camelot.
One of IDA’s twelve member universities, the University of Michigan, was already deeply involved in Thailand, seeding the jungle with microphones and seismic devices to distinguish natural varieties of background noise (created by insects and animals) from human movements, so that troops, artillery, or bombers could be alerted.36 That university also trained Thai officers in aerial surveillance technology and the analysis of imagery at its Infrared Physics laboratory at Willow Run.
To facilitate using the Tribal Research Center’s resources and contacts (including its associated American anthropologists, linguists, and missionaries), the American Advisory Council for Thailand joined the Thai National Police in signing a contract with UCLA. The council’s work was understood explicitly to be organized as “part of the operation of the U.S. Overseas Mission.”37
Operating behind the advisory council was another organization with a larger regional vision: the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group (SEADAG). In fact, the Advisory Council for Thailand was the creation of SEADAG.38
With SEADAG, the chain of manipulation in the Southeast Asian war, running from tribal recruits to missionaries and anthropologists to AID and the CIA, finally ended. It ended where it usually did, at the top, where purse strings were held by policymakers who just happened to control larger purses, literally the deposits and debts of whole nations. These were powerful businessmen, and among their leaders were the Rockefellers.
THE FORCE BEHIND THE WAR
SEADAG had been set up in the early 1960s as an Asian counterpart to David Rockefeller’s Business Group for Latin America. Its membership included Rockefeller Brothers, Inc., Chase Manhattan Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of Indiana, and IBEC (which invested heavily in Thailand).
Ironically, of the five Rockefeller brothers, the one who became the most associated in the public eye with SEADAG was the least political: John 3rd. Unlike Nelson with IBEC, David with Chase Bank, and Laurance with Eastern Airlines, John 3rd had no great personal business interest, much less one in Vietnam. He was the quintessential naive philanthropist. He was “Mr. Asia,” the leader of the Japan Societ
y and the founder of the Asia Society. Yet it was this status and this last organization that tainted the Rockefeller name.
The man who, however inadvertently, pulled the Rockefeller name into the sordid spotlight the family had been trained to avoid was one of the Rockefeller family’s most astute political operatives in Southeast Asia. The son of missionaries, Kenneth Todd Young had weathered a nationalist upheaval at Ling Nam University in China and escaped to the Sorbonne in the mid-1930s. Thanks to a teaching scholarship at Harvard, he became one of the best-connected economic thinkers at wartime Washington’s Natural Resources Planning Board and the War Production Board. Then Young became a political intelligence officer in the State Department and later vice president of Standard Oil of New York (Mobil). It was Young who paved the way for American backing of Diem during the Eisenhower Administration, when he was acting director of the State Department’s Office of Philippine and Southeast Asian Affairs; in fact, it was he who drafted Eisenhower’s fateful letter to Diem in 1954 committing U.S. support to replace the French colonialists.
In the late 1950s, Young went to work for Mobil’s subsidiary in the Far East. With his rarefied background among missionaries and oil executives, his credentials were attractive to President Kennedy’s counterinsurgency experts at a time when the CIA’s “secret war” was being launched in Laos. In 1961, Roswell Gilpatric, Edward Lansdale, and Chester Bowles quietly nudged him into accepting the ambassadorship to Thailand.
With the stoic resolve of a professional, Young accepted Washington’s orders to direct his own staff in Thailand to back the losing effort in South Vietnam. But he was unconvinced of the capacities of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon or of Washington’s resolve to back Diem as long as Diem’s troublesome in-laws, the Nhus, were dominant figures in Saigon.
By 1963, Ambassador Young had had enough. He decided to retire. By doing so, he averted personal political disaster in the short run, only to ensure it later.
His first stateside job was on John 3rd’s personal staff. Then John 3rd took another fateful step: He made Young president of the Asia Society. This was not John’s inspiration; Dean Rusk’s State Department had suggested it.
Rumors of U.S. government direction of the Asia Society were already afloat when Young moved SEADAG into the Asia Society’s four-story headquarters in Manhattan. John approved this relocation, despite SEADAG’s obvious sponsorship by the U.S. government, the involvement of the CIA-funded Asia Foundation, and overt funding by AID. It was a sign of just how far the Rockefellers were willing to go in committing the United States—as well as their own name—to back the Saigon regime. This was not merely a matter of the Rockefellers patriotically doing what the U.S. government wanted; they wanted the U.S. government to do what they wanted: prevent the NLF from coming to power in South Vietnam, by war if necessary. Responding affirmatively to Rusk’s people at State was essentially a matter of responding affirmatively to the implementation of a policy that was a reflection of their own ideological orientation. Packaged sincerely as patriotism, State’s request could hardly be refused. Rockefellers, too, must be prepared to share the nation’s risks during war.
The son who had been charged with defending the family’s honor, who had taken pains to preserve a humanitarian, politically gray image of the Rockefeller Foundation, was now risking it all for the sake of victory in a war that was destroying the very art and culture he had championed as Mr. Asia. By 1967, the head of SEADAG’s Council of Vietnamese Studies, Samuel P. Huntington, had devised a rationalization for Johnson’s massive bombing of rural South Vietnam: “forced urbanization.”
SEADAG, of which Young became chairman, had grandiose plans for Southeast Asia. Oil and natural gas reserves were known to exist in Thailand and off the coast of Vietnam.* More immediately promising, however, was the hydroelectric energy that could be harvested by building dams along the upper Mekong River.
The Mekong River Delta’s 5,500 miles of interlaced waterways already provided drainage, irrigation, and transportation across a tangle of swamps. Because the region lacked roads, the delta had always been a difficult area for Saigon to control—until Johnson’s massive U.S. military intervention. Following the recommendations of Pentagon-financed aerial research studies,39 the United States transformed the delta’s languid calm into a clattering hothouse of death. The U.S. Army’s Ninth Infantry Division arrived to provide troops for a Mekong Delta Mobile Riverine Force to help the U.S. Navy’s River Assault Flotillas keep the rice flowing up the Cho Gao Canal to Saigon. Swarms of U.S. Army helicopter gunships and U.S. Marine Corps riverboats descended upon the delta. Ironically, but predictably, rice production in the area—which previously had earned the delta its fame as “the Rice Bowl of Asia”—plummeted. To Asians, the word paddy meant rice; to young American GIs, it meant a quick death. The enemy remained mostly invisible, revealed only at the point of crippling spikes submerged in muddy water or by bullets fired by local peasants, who belonged to the NLF by night and to Saigon by day.
But there was more at stake along the Mekong River Delta than the lives of GIs, even if death was what the American media focused on. Military control over the Mekong made strategic sense to U.S. generals concerned about maintaining the river as the lifeline to Saigon and the Cambodian and Laotian capitals on its banks to the north; to American businessmen associated with SEADAG, U.S. occupation of the Mekong River basin meant some of the world’s largest dams, financed by AID and the World Bank, all designed to produce cheap hydroenergy for industrialization in Thailand and South Vietnam. It meant the cheap labor of peasants fleeing the increasingly indiscriminate U.S. bombings and search-and-destroy sweeps across the countryside. And it meant cheap commercial food production, not only for South Vietnam, but for exports to the much vaster cheap labor pool in India.
India, in fact, was the Asian home base for Rockefeller Foundation operations in Southern Asia. At the capital in New Delhi, the Rockefeller Foundation maintained its last remaining office abroad, headed by former Defense Undersecretary Roswell Gilpatric’s brother, Chadbourne Gilpatric, himself a former CIA officer and a current member of John 3rd’s Asia Society. This office directed funds into New Delhi’s Indian Agricultural Research Institute, making India a host for training Southeast Asian agronomists.40 The idea was to develop, as in the Philippines, “training facilities in agriculture, medicine and administration in the expectation that their influence will radiate throughout South Asia.”41
The vision of Nelson and his brothers went far beyond the immediate war profiteering enjoyed by some of Johnson’s closest friends among Texas’s nouveau riche. The Rockefellers were talking about bigger things, like changing the landscape of entire subcontinents.
There were, to be sure, short-term profits to be made. Rockefeller-family investments scored well in blue-chip defense contractors, such as Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Boeing, and General Motors—which took in more than $1.3 billion in military contracts in 1968 alone.42
Expecting the United States to win the war, U.S. banks began to open branches in Saigon. “Afterwards, you’ll have a major job of reconstruction on your hands that will take financing,” said a vice president of J. Stillman Rockefeller’s First National City Bank, “and financing means banks.”43
David Rockefeller understood that fact. In 1965, Chase announced that it, too, was opening a branch in downtown Saigon. The Chase building stood like a giant fortress dwarfing the GI bars and small shops that surrounded it. There were no windows, just thick glass blocks. The stone walls were built to withstand mortar attacks. It was as if David Rockefeller was making a point in the face of the Viet Cong threat: Here was real power. It was the kind of blunt challenge liked by his colleagues in the most ironically named prowar group of the Vietnam era: the Committee for an Effective and Desirable Peace in Asia.
Chase was indeed an effective and durable force in the world, but that was to be expected; it was, after all, the Pentagon that asked David to open the bran
ch in Saigon.44
In July 1966, David flew to Saigon. He came, he explained, officially to inaugurate Chase’s new branch. But he also was there to show his support for Johnson’s war, and he paid a call on Premier General Nguyen Cao Ky. Ky was not only head of Saigon’s government; he also commanded officers who controlled much of Saigon’s drug trade.45 According to CIA contract employee Sam Mustard, an associate of SIL’s former chief pilot Larry Montgomery,* Ky’s involvement went back to the early 1960s, when he flew CIA commandos into North Vietnam via Laos.46 The substance of David’s talks with Ky were kept confidential, but David’s mere presence in Ky’s war-torn capital spoke for itself: Ky and his rival, General Nguyen Van Thieu, could rest assured that the Rockefellers and the investors they represented were here to stay.47
Heroin and Opium Smuggling into South Vietnam
Helio Couriers helped the CIA’s Air America, the transporter of opium for Indochinese drug lords.
Source: Alfred W. McCoy and Cathleen B. Read, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, p. 155. Copyright © 1972 by Alfred W. McCoy and Cathleen B. Read. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
David’s president of Chase’s Far East operations had tried to make that point the previous year, shortly after Johnson escalated U.S. military involvement: “I must say … that the U.S. actions in Vietnam this year—which have demonstrated that the U.S. will continue to give effective protection to the free nations of the region—have considerably reassured both Asian and Western investors.” He predicted a level of economic growth similar to that achieved in postwar Europe under the Marshall Plan.48 If anyone had doubted the bank officer’s word, David Rockefeller’s chauffeured car whisking through the streets of Saigon testified to the Rockefellers’ commitment to SEADAG’s vision.
The theories of SEADAG’s Samuel P. Huntington provided the grimmer reality behind these dramas: cheap labor created by forced relocation from a terrorized countryside. Anthropologist Jules Henry, who had witnessed tribal decimation in Brazil, explained to a numbed American people what this entailed: “The establishment throughout Southeast Asia of industrial complexes backed by American capital is sure to have a salutary effect on the development of our foreign investment. The vast land’s cheap labor pool will permit competition with the lower productive costs of Chinese and Japanese industry, which have immobilized our trading capabilities in Asia for many years.… The destruction of the Vietnamese countryside is the first, and necessary, step to the industrialization of Vietnam and the nationalization of its agriculture.”49
