The mystery solved itself over the summer. Victor Marchetti, a special assistant to Richard Helms, records that his chief was another who did not credit the Guevara-Bolivia thesis. Despite Helms’s and FitzGerald’s doubts, Bill Broe ordered some Special Operations Division people sent to La Paz. As a result, in June the division set up an unusual unit within Tilton’s station to concentrate on Guevara. Tilton, who had been a case officer in two Latin countries, realized the need to genuflect to Bolivian attitudes about arrogant Americans, and all three members would be Cuban contract agents, exile veterans of the Bay of Pigs. Not long afterward, reacting to Che’s village raid, Bolivian army troops discovered Guevara’s base camp. There they found photos of Che in his Bolivian disguise. When examined closely, several features resembled Guevara, and a couple of smudged fingerprints clinched the case. Captured documents identified others as Cubans too, including some thought to have been with Che in Africa.

  Suddenly the equation changed, not in La Paz but in Washington. At his northern Virginia vacation home in The Plains that July, Des FitzGerald collapsed playing tennis one afternoon and died. Tom Karamessines succeeded to leadership of the DO. It fell to Karamessines to take the news to Helms. Although Helms still refused to believe, he could no longer simply dismiss the evidence on Che, and he authorized a stronger CIA effort.

  In early August Felix Rodriguez and Gustavo Villoldo arrived in La Paz and began their special mission, joined by a third Cuban agent. They met with Interior Minister Antonio Arguedas, who gave them cover identities as captains in his ministry. At the end of the month came a true Bolivian victory: a mountain battle where Guevara’s band was caught and lost a third of its force, including Tania, with a key Cuban lieutenant captured. Rodriguez and a Bolivian officer questioned Che’s aide.

  Meanwhile U.S. Special Forces completed training the Bolivian Second Rangers, which took the field in mid-September. After about ten days they caught Che’s band near the village of La Higuera. The CIA’s Felix Rodriguez joined the Rangers to provide tactical advice. Operations continued near the village until October 8, when the Rangers caught up to the guerrilla band one more time. There Capt. Gary Prado Salmon’s company captured Che Guevara. The guerrilla commander, wounded in the leg, could not flee.

  With the notorious Che in custody, the immediate issue for the CIA became obtaining intelligence from the fidelista. Here the agency’s interests clashed with the Bolivian desire to see Guevara dead. During the long pursuit both Ambassador Henderson and station chief Tilton tried to convince Barrientos that if Che were captured he should be brought to La Paz for interrogation. Barrientos demurred, afraid of the unrest that could accompany Che’s arrival, captive or not. When the moment came, Tilton was on leave and Henderson knew nothing.

  Felix Rodriguez and the Bolivian field commander took a helicopter from their tactical headquarters to La Higuera. Afraid he could not convince the Bolivians to spare Guevara, Rodriguez left a message for retransmission to Langley through the station in Paraguay. He thought that an embassy official sent to the scene might have better luck. Langley got word too late. Rodriguez photographed Che’s papers, including his Bolivian diary, and talked to the Argentinian revolutionary. Che proved quite willing to discuss revolution but refused to answer questions about his mission. Then came a call on the field telephone. The Bolivian officers were away. Rodriguez answered in his cover identity as a captain of the Interior Ministry. He heard the code numbers that ordered Guevara’s execution. Rodriguez passed the order along. Sgt. Jaime Teran did the deed. Later the Bolivians moved the body to a hospital at Vallegrande, where CIA contract officer Gustavo Villoldo got in the act. Villoldo appeared in pictures beside Che’s body and gave journalists the impression he supervised the activity. That became the first public knowledge the CIA had had anything to do with Che Guevara’s death. In a macabre touch the Bolivians cut off Guevara’s head and hands and disposed of the body. Photographs of the dead Che proved an embarrassing faux pas.

  Washington experienced a few days of confusion while the particulars were tied down and Guevara identified. Walt Rostow, at a meeting where the initial cable appeared, snapped his pencil in half and beamed. His memos to LBJ over the next days exhibited increasing confidence, until on October 11 he presented the event as discouraging potential guerrillas. Rostow exulted: “It marks the passing of another of the aggressive, romantic revolutionaries like Sukarno, Nkrumah, Ben Bella—and reinforces this trend.”

  Che’s Bolivian diary soon acquired a life of its own. Before his death the 303 Committee actually discussed the handling of documents expected to be captured and agreed on a cover story—that the Bolivians had asked the United States to analyze these materials. It is a fair inference that the Special Group later specifically considered what to do with the diary, though evidence that might establish this remains classified. In any case, various versions of the diary appeared during the summer of 1968, including one released by Castro. How Havana might have acquired a copy of Guevara’s Bolivia diary became a mystery unraveled by Antonio Arguedas, the interior minister. Arguedas suddenly disappeared—he had gone to Chile and asked for asylum, but instead the Chileans handed him over to the CIA station in Santiago. Langley sent Nick Lenderis, his original recruiter, to talk some sense into the man. The CIA then followed and accommodated Arguedas as he traveled to London, New York, and Lima, Peru. The Bolivian gave a series of press conferences in which he not only revealed giving the diary to Castro but that he himself had been a CIA agent, charging the agency with interfering in the internal affairs of his country. Arguedas finally returned to La Paz to stand trial, survived an assassination attempt, fled to Mexico, and turned up in Havana in 1970, bearing Che’s death mask and embalmed hands. Not long afterward John Tilton, the former station chief, was sent to Vietnam as the last director of the notorious Phoenix program.

  The meaning of the long struggle against Castro for America’s Wilsonian ideals of self-determination and democracy is debatable. No one elected Fidel Castro, true enough. And the professed goal of the Cuba project had been to get rid of him, after which Cubans themselves could decide who their leaders would be. The agency supported Cuban exiles who wanted that. But the CIA had also supported Fulgencio Batista, and no one had elected him either, except in trumped-up plebiscites intended to consolidate his control. Nor were Joseph Mobutu or René Barrientos elected to the posts they held. Democratic values did not run deeply among those whom Washington backed in its secret wars. What remained true would be that Washington warned against socialist ideals. A truly democratic policy cannot exclude any political belief, and in this sense the secret war fell far wide of the Wilsonian vision. As for Cold War issues, it was never true that all those enemies marched to the tune of Moscow drummers. It would be more accurate to say that Washington chose sides in the countries where it intervened, then cloaked those conflicts in the trappings of ideological warfare, justifying its interventions in the name of democracy. These were purposeful choices, not accidental ones.

  The secret war against Castro shows the warriors at full stride—created under Truman, enhanced by Eisenhower, built up by Kennedy, enthused by the potential of counterinsurgency strategy. By the 1960s both capabilities and contingencies were in place. The Congo became one front in a global competition, Cuba a second. Two such campaigns conducted simultaneously formed quite an achievement, but even more impressive is that both went on in concert with a third sustained effort in Vietnam as well as other CIA operations. The secret warriors had truly achieved a global reach.

  * McCone special assistant Walter Elder remembers this as a telephone call from CIA headquarters, and as taking place a day or two later.

  * In the Church Committee’s report Alleged Assassination Plots (p. 171), this is mentioned as part of a category comprising events not initiated by the United States, but the original record, declassified in 1996, shows that that statement is not correct. Two of the four contingencies (Castro’s death or a Hungary-style repression) could have been triggered by U.S. actions, and the introduction to the language on the agenda memo says nothing about foreign initiation. McGeorge Bundy’s cover note, incidentally, adds that the memo “speaks in circumlocution on one or two sensitive points.”

  * No relation to the New Orleans district attorney who acquired fame in the 1960s pursuing tendrils of the alleged plots against John F. Kennedy.

  15

  War in Southeast Asia

  ALTHOUGH NOT CUT from the same cloth as Maxwell Taylor, Ed Lansdale also considered himself something of a theorist. Managing Operation Mongoose and backstopping covert action at the Pentagon took Lansdale away from his primary interest, counterinsurgency (CI). For a decade after his work in the Philippines, Lansdale continued to advocate psychological warfare and other CI techniques. He expounded what he called the “demotic” strategy, an approach especially aimed at the popular will, its goal the same as “winning hearts and minds.”

  Lansdale occasionally got the chance to articulate his vision. In 1959, after Eisenhower ordered air force C-130s to fly construction equipment to certain upland villages in Laos, Lansdale toured, adding the Philippines and Vietnam to his itinerary, then wrote a long report on the potential of “civic action.” A skilled harmonica player, he believed in the armed patrol with a guitarist, helping build village dispensaries and schools, giving medical help to villagers, and employing other tactics designed to win popular sympathy. Lansdale argued his case strongly, and he had extra credibility as architect of the successful Huk campaign for which he had won the National Security Medal.

  General Lansdale also happened to be the American behind the ascendancy of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Despite his fervor, Lansdale’s remained a controversial strategy until the advent of Jack Kennedy. Even within CIA, where political action had become a credo, many preferred direct measures. At the beginning of 1961, a few weeks before Kennedy’s inauguration, Lansdale went to Saigon for a fresh assessment. He found the Diem government losing its dynamism in the countryside while guerrilla warfare spread and the army floundered. Diem had barely survived a coup two months earlier. The U.S. military advisory group, with which Lansdale had once served, remained too hampered by restrictions to have much impact.

  Lansdale spent a little over two weeks in Vietnam. He spoke with Diem and other Vietnamese as well as embassy people. Compiling his report on the plane to Washington, Lansdale submitted it on January 17. In Saigon he had found American and Vietnamese officials who talked like the French and Vietnamese in Hanoi in 1953–1954. He saw Vietnam as under “intense psychological attack”; 1961 would be a fateful year, and “Vietnam is in a critical condition and [we] should treat it as a combat area of the cold war, as an area requiring emergency treatment.”

  Lansdale’s report presented his vision of an operation “changed sufficiently to free these Americans to do the job that needs doing.” His answer was to select “the best people you have”—in Lansdale’s opinion, “a hard core of experienced Americans who know and really like Asia and the Asians”—and give them a free hand. A new ambassador should be sent immediately as well as “a mature American” to conduct “political operations to start creating a Vietnamese-style foundation for more democratic government.”

  This report created a stir in Washington. Walt Rostow showed it to President Kennedy days after he entered office. Busy, Kennedy didn’t want to read it. Rostow told him he should. Kennedy looked up when he had finished.

  “This is the worst one we’ve got, isn’t it?” asked JFK curiously. “You know, Eisenhower never mentioned it. He talked at length about Laos, but never uttered the word Vietnam.”

  The secretary of defense wanted to hear from the author himself. Robert McNamara asked Lansdale around. “Somehow I found him very hard to talk to,” recalled Lansdale later. “Watching his face as I talked, I got the feeling that he didn’t understand me.”

  Several attempts to assign Lansdale to Vietnam were blocked until 1965 when Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge overrode all opposition. In the meantime Ed Lansdale retired after Mongoose. In Vietnam, psychological warfare would be strictly an adjunct to conventional force.

  President Kennedy formed a committee to canvass Vietnam alternatives. Given the Pentagon’s status as the biggest player, McNamara deputy Roswell Gilpatric chaired the group. The Gilpatric committee faced a difficult task: many of its members had entered with the new administration and were just finding their balance. Gilpatric’s own recollection is that “none of us . . . who were charged with the responsibility for this area, had any preparation for this problem. What we didn’t comprehend was the inability of the Vietnamese to absorb our doctrine, to think and to organize the way we did.” Still, the Gilpatric group came to President Kennedy on May 6, 1961, with a list more than forty items long.

  Kennedy’s decisions set a course for the American experience in Vietnam. Between doing nothing or committing U.S. forces, JFK chose graduated expansion of effort, beginning a cycle repeated many times. On May 11 Kennedy approved some of the Gilpatric recommendations. The United States expanded its advisory group and paid to increase South Vietnamese forces. Of particular importance for the secret warriors, the program included deployment to Vietnam of a provisional Special Forces group of Green Berets plus a mandate to “expand present operations in the field of intelligence, unconventional warfare, and political-psychological activities.”

  Kennedy also searched for a strategic concept he could use in this growing conflict. Counterinsurgency theory suggested population resettlement, leading to “strategic hamlets” and many subsequent variants. Geography suggested sealing off South Vietnamese borders, preventing infiltration from the North or through Laos. The border-control approach, touted as early as May 1961 by Robert Komer, a CIA analyst on duty with the NSC staff, became a pillar of the U.S. concept. With its twin, pacification, it provided the foundatiom for U.S. strategy throughout the Vietnam War. North Vietnam countered with the Ho Chi Minh Trail, begun in 1959, which moved cadres to the battlefields of the South. Supplies traveled down the trail and went by sea as well.

  In November 1961 Kennedy faced a recommendation for a commitment of regular U.S. troops, this time from Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow, just returned from a survey trip on Kennedy’s behalf. General Taylor tried to prevent Ed Lansdale from participating, but McNamara insisted he go to perform a special assignment—helping the Bissell study of resources for unconventional warfare. The Taylor-Rostow report included options for a “radical” increase in the numbers of Green Berets, and “increased covert offensive operations in the North as well as in Laos and South Vietnam.” President Kennedy rejected the troop request while approving almost everything else, including covert action.

  Indeed more secret warriors were reaching South Vietnam. The same day he sent Taylor and Rostow to Saigon, JFK ordered out the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron, the special air warfare “Jungle Jim” unit, operational on November 16, 1961. It flew missions under the code name Farm Gate. The deployment figured in a wider expansion. America’s assistance group grew from fewer than 700 when JFK entered the White House to more than 12,000 by mid-1962. There were U.S. supply units to support the Vietnamese, U.S. helicopter units to fly them to battle, the Special Forces, plus navy, air force, and Marine Corps detachments. Farm Gate retained its clandestine status while semi-clandestine air force units followed: Mule Team to fly short-range air transport, Ranch Hand (at first called Hades) which dumped toxic chemicals to defoliate the countryside, and more. The Vietnam contingent could hardly be called a “group” anymore; it became the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), continuing to grow to about 22,000 by 1964.

  Despite this plentiful support, conditions in South Vietnam deteriorated. The Vietnamese never seemed to catch the elusive National Liberation Front (NLF) rebels. It was evident by 1963 that Diem had lost most of his remaining political support, in particular when his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, began using force to quell demonstrations by Buddhists, the majority religious movement. South Vietnamese army officers felt the crisis made it impossible to prosecute the war. In Saigon, talk of a coup filled the air.

  Those early days in Vietnam, much like Korea in years past, were an adventure for Americans. In the beginning it had been Ed Lansdale who established the close U.S. relationship with Vietnamese authorities. When he left at the end of 1956 the liaison role remained a major activity of the CIA station at Saigon. Later that role grew. The CIA wanted its own sources among South Vietnamese politicians. By 1960 the agency had the best information outside the presidential palace, save perhaps for the NLF intelligence networks. Indeed, in a 1960 coup attempt, CIA officers were in contact with both sides throughout. This caused some difficulty for station chief William E. Colby when Diem’s brother Nhu found out. Threatened with arrest or worse, CIA officer George Carver had to be spirited out of Saigon. A second officer, Ed Regan, was pulled out temporarily until the Vietnamese cooled off.

  Another task on the CIA’s list was to infiltrate North Vietnam using Vietnamese special forces (formed in 1958) or paramilitary teams recruited by the CIA. Allen Dulles briefed Kennedy on the initiative early in 1961, and the president ordered intensification of the effort. Bill Colby created Project Tiger for this mission. The agency quickly gave up on Saigon special forces—they ran operations only inside South Vietnam. Instead the CIA recruited its own Vietnamese commandos. Colby, with his experience on Soviet programs and with the OSS in France and Norway, ought to have been the first to question feasibility here, but he forged ahead. North Vietnam had excellent security services. Colby tried to send agents, both singleton spies and teams, by sea and air. Ed Regan and Russ Miller trained the commandos assiduously. Navy detailees to the CIA prepared the boat crews. The South Vietnamese air force manned CIA planes for airdrops. But Hanoi swept up every team and even mounted a show trial late in 1961 of a Saigon aircrew captured when their plane crashed on a resupply flight. More than 200 commandos were lost in Project Tiger. McGeorge Bundy warned Kennedy in 1963 that the missions involved most of the dangers common to those in denied areas. But the U.S. military took over and continued five more years, losing 450 more South Vietnamese to no effect. Hanoi had penetrated the program from the beginning.