by Gerard Colby
But if anthropologists like Henry were seriously questioning the war’s purported sole anticommunist motive in a nation with a $27 per month average wage, there were few doubts among American missionaries.
In the heat of war, some American missionaries shed their clerical neutrality and picked up the gun. The most famous missionary soldiers were the Youngs of Burma. They were recruited by the CIA to gain compliance from the tribesmen in northwestern Burma in gathering intelligence on political activities in their own countries, southern China, and Thailand.
Using Chiang Mai as their listening post and base of operations, the Youngs directed military raids by the CIA’s tribal recruits against suspected “communist” villages in eastern Thailand and Laos, as well as into China’s Yunan Province. Another pistol-packing missionary, Joseph Flipse, assisted the Youngs in leading commando raids by Yao tribesmen on Laotian villages that were identified as sympathetic to the Pathet Lao communists.50 Flipse was a member of the International Voluntary Service (IVS), Christian Fundamentalism’s answer to the secular Peace Corps. IVS’s Saigon office was headed by Don Luce, a prominent member of SEADAG’s advisory panels.
Another IVS volunteer, the folksy Edgar (“Pop”) Buell, was the classic grandfatherly American missionary. Buell trained Hmong tribesmen in demolition and organized the dynamiting of bridges and passes through the Laotian mountains. He also arranged the first contact with the poppy-growing Hmong for the CIA and got the tribesmen to carve landing strips out of the mountainside for the CIA’s wide-winged Helio Couriers. In 1961, General Edward Lansdale reported to Washington that 9,000 Hmong had been “recruited” for guerrilla warfare. The recruitment was actually a draft system by elders of young men; the CIA’s weapons, clothes, and rice encouraged clan rivalries to express themselves through violence against clans allied with the Pathet Lao. AID provided cover for CIA operations and agents, who directed at its peak an army of 40,000 men from the Hmong and other tribes. Pop Buell joined them in AID’s ranks. Rice was cut off by the CIA to villages that did not want to keep sending their men to war or did not want to move on CIA orders; forced migrations often caused villages a 20 percent casualty rate, mostly children and elders. Buell defended the use of humanitarian relief to support the CIA’s war. By 1970, this Indiana farmer would be cajoling the polygamist general of the CIA’s secret army, Vang Pao, to “hold on,” to keep fighting, despite 30,000 Hmong dead, the drafting of twelve-year-old boys, and Vang Pao’s pleas that “the good ones are all dead, my Father. Dead.”51
As souls ascended to heaven in the fight against Satan, many clergy became direct collaborators with the CIA. One member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) was proud of this collaboration. William Carlsen, a missionary in northeastern Thailand, considered it “a privilege to share information with responsible agencies of the government where they seek us out.” Carlsen gave an eight-hour briefing to the CIA on Thailand’s tribal areas when he returned home for a furlough. Most C&MA missionaries did likewise, according to a CIA source. Most of the information gleaned was about people, their actions, opinions, and grievances.52
Yet the full implications of the missionaries’ complicity in the CIA and military intelligence operations would not hit home until stories began to surface about a massacre in a village named My Lai and a CIA program of mass assassinations called Operation Phoenix.
*CRESS had been set up to carry out research for the Pentagon under a more military-sounding name, the Special Operation Research Office. Following revelations of its sponsorship of Project Camelot’s planned counterinsurgency study in Chile, it had to change its name. CRESS’s classified area handbooks showed how to conduct psychological warfare that might complement low-intensity warfare. In 1967, to escape growing student protests, CRESS moved off American University’s campus and disappeared into the folds of another Pentagon think tank, American Institute for Research, known charmingly as AIR. Based in Pittsburgh, it had only one foreign office: in Bangkok, Thailand.
*Besides the huge Arawakan fields in Burma, northwestern Thailand in fact did have three oil fields east of Burma’s Irrawaddy River, knowledge of which was made public in the American press as early as 1967. Natural gas reserves were also locked beneath the sea in the Gulf of Thailand. Years later, Union Oil of California—whose founding family had underwritten Fundamentalist Christian missionaries, including Cameron Townsend—would discover gas there, as would Texas Pacific. But the major discovery would be by Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon) at Channabot, again in northwestern Thailand, where Standard Oil had a 50,000-square-mile concession. Oil was also believed to exist (and has since been confirmed) beneath the Gulf of Tonkin (claimed by the People’s Republic of China, as it was then called) between Hanoi and China’s Hainan Island, and gas was believed to exist off the Red River Delta.
The biggest hopes, of course, were placed in South Vietnam’s vast Mekong River Delta. Oil existed south of the delta, in an offshore field named Dua-IX by the oil companies (see International Petroleum Encyclopedia, 1983, p. 234).
*Sam Mustard wrote to Senator Ernest Gruening on March 9, 1968 (see New York Times, April 19, 1968, p. 1). The association between Mustard and Montgomery was as fellow CIA contract employees who had as their mission the setting up of a more effective maintenance and communications system in Laos similar to the JAARS model described by Helio Corporation president Lynn Bollinger and Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty in 1961. Montgomery’s participation in the mission overseas was scrubbed after two months of preparations, and Mustard, trained by Montgomery, went to Southeast Asia alone in March 1962. Montgomery’s association with Mustard is described in a memorandum from Nathan Fitts, a Helio employee secretly placed in the company by the CIA, and CIA general counsel Lawrence R. Houston. A copy of this memorandum, dated June 5, 1962, is in the authors’ possession.
36
“NATION-BUILDING” THROUGH WAR
RIDING THE PHOENIX
By the end of the 1960s, only a few Washington insiders knew that Nelson Rockefeller’s institutional legacy from his days as Eisenhower’s special assistant for Cold War strategy—the National Security Council’s Special Group—was responsible for a massive campaign of arrest, torture, and murder in Vietnam. Named appropriately after the mythical bird that rises reborn from the ashes, Phoenix was the last great effort at a counterinsurgency victory that the Special Group would attempt in Vietnam.
Hatched by the CIA in the fall of 1967, Phoenix was directly responsible for the deaths of some 26,000 Vietnamese by official U.S. count, or almost 41,000 if Saigon’s estimate is to be believed. Phoenix rose to these heights of terror under a genteel, God-fearing, Princeton-educated Catholic named William Colby. As CIA station chief in Saigon during the Eisenhower-Kennedy transition years between 1959 and 1962, Colby had directed clandestine operations in support of the dictatorship of Diem, a fellow Catholic in a mostly Buddhist nation. Subsequently chief of the Far East Division of the CIA’s clandestine services, Colby also oversaw the CIA’s secret war in Laos from the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He did so with such little expense ($20 million to $30 million per year) that the war in Laos was considered a great success, despite the battering his 36,000 tribal soldiers received and despite the continuing deterioration in neighboring South Vietnam. In 1966, he was back in Saigon, assisting one of the Special Group’s top counterinsurgency aides, Robert Komer, in directing Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS), the overall pacification program that had Phoenix as its terrorizing component. CORDS also had responsibility for CIA officers who were using the Agency for International Development (AID) as a cover and for cultivation of CORDS’s AID cover with American civilians in the countryside, including missionaries.
By 1968, when Colby was elevated to the rank of special ambassador, Phoenix was forcing 250,000 civilians through South Vietnam’s prison system, often relying on no more than the word of paid informers. This was at a time when the CIA estimated that the communist-led
National Liberation Front (NLF) totaled at most 150,000 people. Moreover, this flow of 250,000 suspects continued annually until 1972, when the operation was shut down.
The spine of Phoenix was a series of Provincial Interrogation Centers stretching across South Vietnam’s forty-four provinces, but Phoenix’s muscle was the CIA’s Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRU). “CIA representatives recruited, organized, supplied, and directly paid CT [counter-terror] teams,” whose function was to use Viet Cong techniques of terror, assassination, abuses, kidnappings, and intimidation—against the Viet Cong leadership.”1 Under Phoenix, however, the “leadership” became anyone a paid informer chose to accuse, multiplied by hundreds of thousands of people.
The CIA’s William Buckley, as early as May 1967, had warned the Agency’s top scientist, Sidney Gottlieb, that such abuses of civilians—including raping and pillaging by American soldiers—as well as indiscriminate carpet bombing and chemical defoliation of the countryside were giving the NLF ammunition for propaganda operations and indoctrination of recruits. But others at CIA headquarters in Langley disagreed. Gottlieb sent Buckley’s report to CIA Director Richard Helms, who rewarded Buckley by recalling him to Langley and demoting him to “Agency drudge.”2 Felix Rodriguez, on the other hand, who had recently arrived in Vietnam from his adventures against Che Guevara in Bolivia, continued recruiting NLF war prisoners for PRU hunts against their former compatriots, deliberately releasing their identities to the NLF to remove any hope of reconciliation.
For NLF prisoners who did not cooperate, the CIA had an efficient procedure: They were tortured until they died. CIA doctors conducted medical experiments, including those on prisoners held in a compound behind the Bien Hoa hospital, all in violation of international law. Slowly, methodically, the Agency’s psychiatrists tortured prisoners classified by local CIA officers as “typical examples of communist indoctrination.” When their attempts to shake the prisoners’ beliefs met with frustration, the scientists decided to continue electrically shocking the prisoners. The torture went on for three weeks, until the last prisoner died.3
That was the “hard” side of “reeducation” under Komer’s and Colby’s pacification program. The “soft” side was where Cam Townsend’s missionaries came in. The SIL’s bilingual education program worked well in meeting the U.S. mission’s technical needs among the Montagnard tribes. English had replaced French as Vietnam’s second language in the upper classes of secondary schools, contributing to Saigon’s drive to assimilate the fiercely independent people of the Central Highlands.
These forested mountains, actually a continuation of the Annam chain separating Vietnam from Cambodia and Laos, were the weak backbone of South Vietnam, subject to easy penetration by soldiers from the north and feeble local support for the regime in Saigon. To promoters of U.S. intervention, however, they were strategically valuable for more than military reasons. As early as February 1958, a conference in New York organized by the Vietnam Lobby (“American Friends of Vietnam”) and attended by scores of representatives of business—including representatives of the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), Chase Manhattan Bank, Standard-Vacuum Oil, Chase International Investment Corporation, and the Asia Society—had identified the high plateau in the Central Highlands as offering “rich possibilities of investment for new capital,”4 with coal reserves and molybdenite. In these sections, “one can draw on the mountaineer Mois [French Vietnamese for the Montagnard or mountain peoples, meaning “Savage”] for a labor supply, but the mountain people are not yet accustomed to holding regular jobs.”5
The job of AID and other Christian missionaries was to change all that and instill in the Montagnard tribes the discipline of the Protestant work ethic. Whatever earlier misgivings Uncle Cam had about channeling SIL recruits into the war zone were now overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of his field missionaries. These missionaries, like Cam, were caught up in the fray by their own Cold War ideological proclivities and ultimately by the pull of powerful forces in the U.S. government and in the corporate world.
The growing apprehension among some reporters and GIs about the summary executions by CIA-directed PRUs did not deter SILers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds in the villages. The SILers continued to gather words, vowels, consonants, affixes, syntaxes, and semantics and to learn the names of sympathizers and opponents in the villages. SILers were supposed to protect the confidentiality of their linguistic informants and to avoid involvement with anything—including intelligence operations—that could compromise their relationship with their tribe or their Bible translation mission. But sometimes there could be a conflict between their professed neutrality, and their mission under the auspices of a government that had expectations. Sometimes this resulted in pressures by the CIA for interviews, which, Townsend claimed, had to be refused.6 But at least one time, SIL did collaborate in a linguistic survey conducted by a Pentagon-funded researcher from RAND, Gerald C. Hickey of the U.S. Embassy staff in Saigon, under contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency. SIL even turned over its linguistic informants to Hickey for his questioning. In fact, Hickey specifically thanked SIL in his acknowledgements, along with “MAC/V [U.S. Military Assistance Command/Vietnam] advisory groups,” U.S. AID representatives, “the Advanced Research Projects Agency Field Unit in Saigon,” and the Saigon government’s Special Commission for Highland Affairs, SIL’s contractor.7
The ties were too deep, and the strings led high, from Vietnam—where the head of U.S. Army Intelligence, General Joseph McChristian, had known SIL since visiting Limoncocha while conducting a counterinsurgency survey in Ecuador during the early Kennedy years—to Washington itself.
After forty years of futilely trying to scale the heights of Washington’s power, SIL found that the White House was at last accessible. Cam had even gotten so far as to cross the White House threshold. Through the good offices of Rev. Calvin Thielman and Nebraska’s Senator Carl Curtis, Cam gained access to Lyndon Johnson’s outer office. Meeting with a presidential aide, Cam lobbied hard (and eventually successfully) for the president to proclaim an official national day for Bible translation. Over and above it all, unspoken but discernible to any politician, loomed the promise of SIL’s large donors, including those from Johnson’s home state. This was no idle dream. Reality had already arrived in the form of gifts “upwards to $100,000 from a couple that divide their time between Dallas and Mexico City,” Cam wrote Rev. Thielman in 1967.8 This letter, ironically enough, was in response to a claim filed by Billy Graham’s father-in-law, Christianity Today editor Nelson Bell, that SIL’s American alias, the Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT), “was receiving large sums from foundations.” Cam denied this claim to Thielman, although in doing so he confirmed that SIL/WBT had received $450,000 from six sources, four of them private foundations,* with only $10,000 from the liberal Ford Foundation and nearly $50,000 “from a U.S. Government agency for a special research project in Africa,” which went unnamed.
TEXAN LURES, NEW YORK STRINGS
Dallas was growing like an incubus in Cam’s dreams for SIL’s expansion. Cam’s ties to Dallas had developed out of his friendship with William Criswell and a supporting group of Texas businessmen.
In the public eye, the center of financial gravity of this group was the Hunt family, longtime supporters of SIL and Texas’s most notorious oilmen. By 1967–1968, when the Hunts’ rightward rush led them away from Johnson and toward the third-party effort headed by Alabama segregationist Governor George Wallace and General “Bomb Them Back to the Stone Age” Curtis LeMay, Cam’s base of support among Dallas businessmen had widened to include oilmen, ranchers, an executive in United Fidelity Union Life Insurance Company, the chairman and a director of Texas Instruments, a director of the Dallas Trust Company, and the chairman of the First National Bank of Dallas. The core group came from Texas Instruments (TI), the giant electronics conglomerate that had absorbed Intercontinental Rubber of past infamy in the Congo and Geophysical Service, I
nc., a major oil surveyor in the Peruvian Amazon. In 1974 the Rockefellers would reveal, in the course of Nelson’s confirmation hearings for the vice presidency, that they and their family trusts owned over $17 million worth of TI’s common stock. The trust department of David’s Chase bank also held a large block of stock in TI’s bank, First National, the largest holding being controlled by the registrar, Stillman Rockefeller’s First National City Bank.9
In 1967, Cam used his newfound Dallas friends to leverage additional support from his old funding base in southern California. He threatened to move SIL’s international headquarters from Santa Ana to Dallas unless money was raised for a larger building. “This city may be deprived of a twenty-year-old business employing 1900 persons,” reported the Santa Ana Register, mistaking Sills global enrollment for employees in the area. “We are now processing applications to add 200 employees and will be adding at least that many each year into the future,” SIL’s extension director, Dale Kietzman, told the Register. “As a result a new location would need to be donated to us entirely, and we found nothing here,” adding that “we would still prefer to relocate right here in Orange County.”10
While thus arming his Orange County supporters for a fund-raising appeal for a new administrative headquarters, Cam plunged ahead with plans to expand into Dallas with a new international translation center. Right-wing oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt had made an offer Cam could not refuse: 100 acres abutting Hunt’s other properties near the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, or money toward buying any other site in the Dallas area. Hunt’s offer, along with $200,000 in contributions, bolstered Cam’s ambitions for SIL in Texas.11 Cam planned to build a $5 million complex of classrooms, libraries, an auditorium, a museum to house tribal artifacts, housing, and a large administrative headquarters, he told the press in September.12 Cam was given the key to the city by the mayor, Erik Jonsson, TI’s former top executive.
