Ike's Spies (40 page)

A year later, in January of 1957, Ike held a review conference with the
NSC
. Always seeking new ways to balance the budget, he complained that intelligence was becoming a $1 billion-a-year operation. The minutes noted that “in discussion the President recalled that because of our having been caught by surprise in World War II, we are perhaps tending to go overboard in intelligence effort.” Admiral Arthur Radford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said that the various intelligence-gathering agencies, including the
CIA
, “are doing quite well in bringing in the material.” But, he added, “we can do better as regards screening and pulling it together.”

Ike said he agreed with the importance of screening material, but he did not want to go too far in that direction either. The
DCI
should not hold back important items, he declared, citing the example of Pearl Harbor, where the senior officers on the spot were not given information available in Washington.

The notes then record that Dulles gave his semiannual report on covert operations. As the meeting ended, the
DCI
told the President he wanted to get General Lucian Truscott to join the
CIA
“and take over the coordination duty.” Ike replied that he wanted it the other way around—“that Mr. Dulles must perform the coordination, and that he should get a man who could manage the operations of the
CIA
.”
²³

But when Truscott came to the
CIA
, he did so as Deputy Director for Community Affairs, with responsibility for coordinating intelligence gathered by the
CIA
, the military services, and the State Department. This did not work out, for, as the Church Committee noted, “the separate elements of the intelligence community continued to function under the impetus of their own internal drives and mission definitions.”
²⁴
As President, Ike never found the replacement for General Strong that he was looking for.

All of which raises the perplexing question, why didn't he fire Dulles? The man had violated his direct orders, in both letter and spirit, in the Truscott affair. Part of the answer is the nature of the beast. President Eisenhower could not impose his will on the federal bureaucracy to anything like the extent that General Eisenhower imposed his will on
SHAEF
. Another part of the answer lies in personality and influence. Ike's very high regard for John Foster Dulles undoubtedly played a major role in his retention of Allen Dulles.

Ike gave his own answer in this statement, quoted by the Church Committee: “I'm not going to be able to change Allen. I have two alternatives, either to get rid of him and appoint someone who will assert more authority or keep him [Allen] with his limitations. I'd rather have Allen as my chief intelligence officer with his limitations than anyone else I know.”
²⁵

So Dulles stayed on, as Ike's chief spy, for the entire eight years of the Eisenhower administration. His reputation was consistently high. He was on the front lines in the Cold War, the man who could overturn governments with a snap of his fingers, foil the
KGB
with the back of his hand, uncover secrets no matter where or how deeply hidden. By pretending to avoid publicity, he attracted it. He was certainly the best-known spy in the world, the subject of feature articles in the
Saturday Evening Post
and
U.S. News & World Report
,
²⁶
as well as a favorite guest of television interviewers. And throughout his tenure as
DCI
, he kept the emphasis of the
CIA
on covert operations.

AS IN VIETNAM
. By the time Ike moved into the White House, in January 1953, the United States was already involved in Vietnam to the extent that it was paying for a considerable portion of the French war effort. One of the first foreign-policy decisions of the Eisenhower administration was to step up that support to include equipment as well as money.

In April 1953, Ike approved “the immediate loan of up to six ‘Flying Boxcars' (C-119s) to the French for use in Indochina to be flown by civilian pilots.” The President wanted the loan kept secret, so he had Allen Dulles and the
CIA
handle the arrangements. In May, Ike had Bedell Smith arrange to send a military mission to Vietnam “to explore ways and means through which American assistance
can best be fitted into workable plans for aggressive pursuit of hostilities.”
²⁷

The escalation was under way. By January 1954 the United States had sent in fifty heavy bombers (B-26s) to support the French at Dien Bien Phu. At a meeting of the “President's Special Committee on Indochina.” Allen Dulles “wondered if our preoccupation with helping to win the battle at Dien Bien Phu was so great that we were not going to bargain with the French as we supplied their most urgent needs.”
²⁸

He was expressing a widespread concern in Washington that if we are going to supply the equipment and pay the cost, we must control the strategy. Ike was impatient with the French, whose strategy was almost as badly executed as it was conceived. He once said, “Who could be so dumb as to put a garrison down in a valley and then challenge the other guy, who has artillery on the surrounding hills, to come out and fight?”
²⁹

To exert more American influence, the Pentagon had convinced the French commander, General Navarre, to accept a group of liaison officers. This was obviously a delicate matter—the French fiercely resented any hint that they needed military advice from the Americans, but they needed the American equipment so badly they could not say no.

Unknown to the French, Dulles had bigger plans. The committee notes state, “Mr. Allen Dulles inquired if an unconventional warfare officer, specifically Colonel Lansdale, could not be added to the group of five liaison officers.… Admiral Radford thought this might be done.”
³⁰

Thus did the redoubtable Colonel Edward Lansdale make his entry into Vietnam, where he made a mark that was later enshrined in two semifictional works,
The Ugly American
and
The Quiet American
. Lansdale was a former San Francisco advertising man who believed in “selling” the American way of life when and where he could, and in covert actions when they were necessary. He was a veteran of guerrilla action against the Communist Hukbalahaps in the Philippines.

Dulles' instructions to Lansdale were to “enter into Vietnam quietly and assist the Vietnamese, rather than the French, in unconventional warfare.” He was not to irritate the French, if possible, but he was to keep them at arm's length. In Vietnam, Lansdale
was to set up the Saigon Military Mission (
SMM
) “to undertake paramilitary operations against the enemy and to wage political-psychological warfare.”
³¹

Lansdale entered Saigon on June 1, 1954. He had a small box of files, a duffle bag of clothes, and a borrowed typewriter. The prospects could not have been gloomier. Dien Bien Phu had just fallen to the Vietminh. At the Geneva Conference, the northern half of Vietnam had been given over to Ho Chi Minh and the Communists. Speaking for the United States, Under Secretary of State Bedell Smith promised that although his government had not signed the Geneva Accords, it would not use force to upset them. That put some limits on how much aid the Eisenhower administration could openly give to the South Vietnamese leader, Ngo Dinh Diem.

On Lansdale's first night in Saigon, Vietminh saboteurs blew up large ammunition dumps at the airport, rocking Saigon throughout the night. Lansdale had no desk space, no office, no vehicle, no safe for his files. He did have the use of the regular Saigon
CIA
station chief's communications system, but he had no assistants, no team. The
SMM
consisted of Lansdale alone.

But he made rapid progress. His reputation from the Philippines had preceded him, and high-ranking South Vietnamese officers made contact. Lansdale organized the Vietnamese Armed Psywar Company. This was in accord with his instructions “to develop homogeneous indigenous units with a native officer corps,” for which purpose he had $124 million to spend.
³²

Lansdale trained his Psywar Company, then sent the soldiers, dressed in civilian clothes, to Hanoi. The city was in a state of near chaos as the French pulled out and the Vietminh took over. The Psywar Company's mission was to spread the story of a Chinese Communist regiment in Tonkin acting in a beastly fashion, emphasizing the supposed mass rapes of Vietnamese girls by Chinese troops. Since Chinese Nationalist troops had behaved in just such a fashion in 1945, and since the Vietnamese had hated and feared the Chinese for centuries, Lansdale was confident that the planted story would confirm Vietnamese fears of Chinese Communist occupation under Vietminh rule.

Alas, no member of Lansdale's Psywar Company ever returned from the mission. To a man, they deserted to the Vietminh.
³³

Lansdale, meanwhile, had jumped into the middle of the confused,
nearly chaotic political situation in Saigon. In mid-1954, the French turned control of the government over to Emperor Bao Dai. His Prime Minister was Ngo Dinh Diem, a pudgy five-foot five-inch aristocrat, fifty-three years old, with a fierce ambition. The Army Chief of Staff was General Hinh, an impatient, disingenuous officer who wanted total control for himself. The struggle for power was between Diem and Hinh, as Bao Dai was enjoying himself in Paris and along the French Riviera.

Lansdale became involved because he was close to both Diem and Hinh. He had met them in the Philippines earlier, liked them both, and got on famously with their wives. He was also a friend of Hinh's mistress, who was a pupil in a small English-language class conducted by the
CIA
mission for the mistresses of various
VIP
s in Saigon.

Because of his connections, Lansdale learned of a plot by Hinh and other high-ranking officers to overthrow Diem. He informed Ambassador Donald Heath, who asked him to see what he could do to prevent an armed attack on the Presidential Palace, where Diem had his office. Lansdale went to Hinh and bluntly told him that United States support for South Vietnam would end if the attack took place. Then he went to the Palace to give the presidential guards tactical advice on how to stop a tank attack. The
SMM
official history records, “The advice, on tank traps and destruction with improvised weapons, must have sounded grim. The following morning, when the attack was to take place, we visited the Palace: not a guard was left on the grounds; Diem was alone upstairs, calmly getting his work done.”
³⁴

The
SMM
, by mid-August 1954, had ten agents. Eight had been rushed in at the last minute, just before the cease-fire went into effect. The newcomers, rounded up in Korea, Japan, and Okinawa, were old
OSS
hands, with some experience in paramilitary operations but none at all in psywar. Their zeal made up for their inexperience. They formed clandestine units of anti-Communist Vietnamese, then went north to disrupt the Communist takeover in Hanoi. One team tried to destroy the largest printing plant there, but Vietminh guards frustrated the attempt. They then tried a so-called black psywar strike, printing leaflets, attributed to the Vietminh, that instructed residents on how to behave for the immediate future. They proclaimed a three-day holiday, outlined a phony monetary reform, and so on. Vietminh currency the next
day fell 50 percent in value, and most of Hanoi was on the streets celebrating the “holiday.”
³⁵

Another team spent the night before the Vietminh takeover at the city bus depot contaminating the oil supply so that the bus engines would gradually be wrecked. The team had to work quickly in an enclosed storage room. Fumes from the contaminant came close to knocking them out. “Dizzy and weak-kneed,” the
SMM
history records, “they masked their faces with handkerchiefs and completed the job.”
³⁶

Back in Saigon, Lansdale's efforts were somewhat more positive. He served as an adviser to Diem, supporting the Prime Minister in his decision to crush the Binh Zuyen, a quasi-criminal sect which controlled gambling, the opium trade, and prostitution in Saigon. Lansdale also persuaded Diem to hold a referendum designed to give his regime a popular legitimacy. The ballot allowed the South Vietnamese to choose between Diem and Emperor Bao Dai, who had thoroughly discredited himself as a playboy tool of the French. Diem got 98 percent of the vote on October 23, 1955, and became President of South Vietnam, which became a republic.
³⁷

Lansdale had ambitious plans for the new republic. He proposed to Allen Dulles that the
CIA
provide the money to support a program he called “Militant Liberty.” He described it as a concept he had used successfully in the Philippines. As Lansdale explained it to Dulles, it sounded like a high school civics exercise: “The heart of any plan to implement ‘Militant Liberty' is the progressive training of groups of indigenous personnel in an understanding of the meaning of a free society to the individual and the individual's responsibilities in creating and maintaining such a society.” He wanted to concentrate the program in the South Vietnamese Army because “the induction-training-discharge cycle provides ready access to indigenous personnel who can play an important role in a revitalization of Vietnam both during their period of military service and subsequently after they have returned to civilian life.”
³⁸

Through the second half of the fifties, Lansdale continued to involve himself in the Byzantine politics of Saigon, a city full of plots, filled with intrigue, and jammed with spies. All his activity could not hide the fact that the United States had been unable to prevent the Communist takeover in North Vietnam and that the
CIA
was incapable of toppling Ho Chi Minh's government in
Hanoi. In the Far East there were to be no cheap victories, as there had been in Iran and Guatemala.