Col. Gilbert Layton of the army ran the Combined Services Division of Colby’s CIA station, controlling Project Tiger and other paramilitary efforts. “Chink” Layton, originally detailed to the CIA, had joined the agency in 1950 and participated in many of the projects of that era. Like Colby, he had set up “stay-behind” networks (in Germany). He had been an instructor on Saipan, had an earlier tour in Saigon and one in Turkey, and had been liaison between the army and the CIA’s Tibetan training center at Camp Hale. The fifty-year-old Layton knew a losing proposition when he saw one but proved unable to change the luck of Project Tiger.

  Chink Layton, Colby, and other CIA officers had far greater success with a paramilitary effort in South Vietnam’s Central Highlands, organizing armed forces among the tribal minorities. For self-defense, an upland counterpart of “strategic hamlets,” then for border control, the tribal units became the basis for a striking force. Called the Village Defense Program by the CIA, and Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGS) by the military, the units had fortified base camps and Green Beret leadership. Until November 1962 the CIDG program was entirely a CIA project; thereafter operational command shifted to MACV, though the agency continued to foot the bill. All responsibility went to the military in a 1963 phase-out of CIA activity known as Operation Switchback. By the time Colonel Layton transferred to Thailand in 1965 the CIDGS were well established. They comprised eighty base camps.

  By then, Colby had left too. At Langley he succeeded Desmond FitzGerald as chief of the DO’s Far East Division. John H. Richardson followed Colby in Saigon. From the army’s Counter Intelligence Corps, Richardson had been an authentic espionage hero in 1944–1945, instrumental in capturing a notorious German spy in Italy. “Jocko” Richardson stayed at CIC after the war, switched to the Central Intelligence Group, then CIA. It was Richardson who, in the denouement of the Albanian project, had shut down the operating bases. He had worked Vienna and Trieste, and moved to Saigon from Manila. Colby introduced Richardson to Ngo Dinh Nhu, now head of Diem’s intelligence services. A gregarious man who had been a classmate of Richard Nixon’s at Whittier College, Jocko, like Chink Layton, spoke four or five languages, including French, indispensable in Saigon. Richardson got on quite well with Nhu, but he was ham-handed—typically, Jocko moved into a house that had been the headquarters for torturers of the French (and then Saigonese) Surété and was thought to be haunted, then wondered why Vietnamese would not visit him there.

  With a style not unlike John McCone, who let subordinates carve out empires as long as they did not cross the boss, Richardson waded into the morass. The Saigon station was no longer the homogeneous unit of forty that Bill Colby had squired. The paramilitary crowd made up one circle, the espionage crew another. Since 1961 there had also been a communications intelligence circle while the demands of war swelled the station with a growing cadre of analysts. Then there were the political action people. One of the agency’s political specialists played a key role in the demise of Ngo Dinh Diem. Lucien Conein, his cover as a lieutenant colonel assigned to the Vietnamese Interior Ministry, but whose real function involved contact with the Vietnamese generals, had also been a member of Lansdale’s 1954–1956 mission.

  The biggest empire within the CIA station was Richardson’s own. His problem lay not with the Saigonese but with U.S. authorities. Convinced that Diem’s time had run out, Washington tried desperately to get him to broaden his government. The assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, Roger Hilsman, evidently with preliminary authorization but while President Kennedy was out of town, drafted a cable backing a coup suggested by Vietnamese generals. Nhu’s special forces had just made bloody, widely condemned attacks on Buddhist pagodas. That became the last straw. A cable on August 26, 1963, instructed Conein and CIA officer Alphonse G. Spero to tell the generals the United States would not oppose a coup if it had good chances of success. Richardson reported the maneuver through CIA channels.

  McCone went on to oppose the coup initiative, soon joined by Taylor, McNamara, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Washington scuttled the Hilsman cable. McCone, Colby, and others spiked the initiative, but Kennedy still insisted Nhu must go. If Diem would not fire his brother, the United States would look for alternatives.

  But Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge felt that John Richardson had undermined him. The ambassador insisted on transferring the station chief. He specifically wanted Ed Lansdale to replace Jocko. Then Nhu too sold out the CIA boss, having a newspaper identify the station chief in print. Abruptly recalled on October 5, Richardson was done. For a time the Vietnamese generals backed down, but two days before Richardson’s hurried recall they told Conein of new coup plans. That coup took place on November 1, 1963. The CIA put up $40,000 for expenses, which Conein carried in a briefcase. Diem and Nhu died in custody of the plotters the next day. Thanks to Conein, the CIA had had a front-row seat to the coup planning if not its precise timing, of which the embassy received just minutes’ warning. Assassination seemed epidemic in November 1963. Three weeks later President Kennedy fell to the sniper’s rifle in Dallas.

  Asked almost two decades later for his opinion of U.S. support for the Diem coup, Edward Lansdale replied, “I think we should never have done it. We destroyed the Vietnamese Constitution, not we, but the people we were working with, threw it in the waste basket.” Indeed, CIA support flew in the face of America’s commitment to democracy and left the United States embroiled in a war that it remained ill suited for, could not win, and could not walk away from. Washington’s search for military effectiveness stood revealed as deeper than its support for democracy. Those who argue that Jack Kennedy would have withdrawn from Vietnam have never been able to get past the consequences of the Diem coup, which President Kennedy, after all, supported. The maneuver eliminated all possible flexibility in U.S. policy. As for the suggestion that the CIA ought to be excused on the basis of its opposition to the coup, this is based on the secret record of its (excessive) policy role rather than the discoverable one of its agents on the street in Saigon. As a practical matter, public and world opinion would be dictated by the discoverable record, not the secret one.

  Several more coups occurred before 1967, when Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu and Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky consolidated control in Saigon. Langley’s political action people made numerous efforts to deepen political support for the regime. Washington repeatedly encouraged Thieu and Ky, as it had Diem, to broaden their base and construct a democracy, but the South Vietnamese institutions created in 1966–1967 never blossomed, and the Saigon regime’s failure never resulted in sanctions from Washington. That too says something about the U.S. commitment to democracy.

  Soon after the Diem coup, Bill Colby arrived in Saigon to pick up the pieces. He had John Richardson to dinner the night before leaving Washington. His priority was to replace the station chief. Colby called on Peer de Silva, recently dispatched to Hong Kong after a long tour as CIA chief in Korea, where he too had seen a coup up close. De Silva had a strong background in espionage against denied areas, and had run security for the atomic bomb project. He and Colby had overlapped for part of a year at Columbia University. Director McCone approved de Silva’s appointment about the time Kennedy died, then made the suggestion to incoming President Lyndon Johnson and recalled de Silva to Washington. He took de Silva to meet the president. LBJ wanted only the best for Saigon. De Silva became the first of a succession of CIA chieftains drawn from top agency ranks.

  In consonance with John Kennedy’s decisions after the Bay of Pigs, the CIA had been ordered to get out of the paramilitary business. That became the origin of Operation Switchback, which turned over the agency’s montagnard CIDGS to the military command in Vietnam. But the prohibition lasted less than a year. A directive already in draft form when LBJ became president provided for unilateral U.S. pressures against North Vietnam, a program of covert military action called OPLAN 34-A. Langley’s Far East baron Bill Colby went to Honolulu within weeks of Diem’s downfall to discuss this with U.S. military commanders. Colby now opposed missions of the sort he had carried out in Project Tiger, but the CIA view would be overridden. President Johnson approved OPLAN 34-A. The CIA boat base at Da Nang, handed over to the military under Switchback early in 1964, would be expanded to support 34-A. Quite soon the military’s Studies and Observation Group (SOG), with orders for commando attacks along the North Vietnamese coast as part of 34-A, added its own version of the infiltration program. The CIA supplied intelligence and specialized support to these activities as long as they continued.

  The 34-A operations led to the next major escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam. On the last night of July 1964 occurred a raid by fast, heavily armed Swift boats, attacking North Vietnamese facilities on the islands of Hon Me and Hon Ngu in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Hon Me raid coincided with another U.S. intelligence activity, a “De Soto” patrol into the Gulf. De Soto patrols were U.S. Navy collection efforts for communications intercepts. Ships on these operations carried enhanced radio equipment. De Soto patrols had been pursued off the coasts of China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. President Kennedy had approved a similar program for North Vietnam in 1962, when the first patrol was conducted. A second De Soto mission took place in 1963, and the destroyer Craig made an intercept cruise in the Gulf in March 1964. In any case, the destroyer Maddox was on a De Soto patrol when Swift boats passed her, the 34-A raiders returning to base. That evening the Maddox steamed past the recently shelled islands.

  The North Vietnamese sent out torpedo boats which attacked the Maddox in international waters the next afternoon. They were driven off with one sunk and the others damaged. President Johnson then deliberately ordered the Maddox back into the Gulf of Tonkin, accompanied by another destroyer, the C. Turner Joy. Two nights later the two destroyers mistook instrument readings for another attack. President Johnson retaliated with carrier air strikes on North Vietnam. He then went to Congress for a resolution supporting his action, and on August 7, 1964, the legislature approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. President Johnson then relied on the resolution in place of a declaration of war.

  McGeorge Bundy’s immediate problem became what to do with De Soto. As a reconnaissance project De Soto patrols were approved by the Special Group, which Bundy chaired. Because of LBJ’s extreme sensitivity to Vietnam developments, the president took up this question directly. Both De Soto and 34-A operations halted while Johnson considered policy. The Joint Chiefs argued for action, bombing North Vietnam and relaxing restrictions on American forces. Maxwell Taylor, ambassador to South Vietnam since July, favored waiting to see if the Vietnamese political situation stabilized. Like Kennedy before him, Johnson selected less than the maximum option: resume De Soto patrols and 34-A; reinforce Farm Gate with heavier jet bombers. Thus operations like De Soto and 34-A, which were provocative, were approved not on their merits but as alternatives to greater provocation.

  Meanwhile on the ground the CIA recovered its earlier momentum. In search of some means to counter the National Liberation Front in the villages, several agency officers innovated armed bands of villagers who within months accounted for the killing of hundreds of guerrillas. De Silva’s deputy, Gordon Jorgensen, soon called the units People’s Action Teams. A variant of the same idea took root in the Mekong Delta, sparked by Stewart Methven, reassigned from Laos. The paramilitary specialist “Rip” Robertson presently materialized in Vietnam to work in these programs. In the Central Highlands the CIDG effort continued to expand. In June 1964 Mac Bundy asked Director McCone to turn back the clock to before Switchback, to have the CIA reenter Vietnam, as it were. In March 1965 McCone presented a consolidated program of a dozen projects the CIA proposed to conduct. The agency essentially defined the role it assumed throughout the Vietnam War.

  The secret war on the western flank of South Vietnam, among the rugged mountains and high plains of Laos, represented a complementary effort to isolate the battlefield in the South. Paramilitary action and political manipulation in Laos attained heights never before achieved. In previous efforts the CIA had always been hampered in one way or another: actions were impeded by U.S. reluctance to show its hand, as with Cuba or in Albania; or by lack of truly popular indigenous groups, as in Indonesia or the People’s Republic of China; or by the absence of suitable support bases, as in Tibet. In South Vietnam the Pentagon had a better claim to command.

  Laos was different. There was no difficulty in defining the mission for the secret warriors—insurgency was increasing in South Vietnam, and the North used Laos to move to the battle area. Thus Laos became the front line in the struggle. Bases were plentiful both there and in neighboring Thailand, another American ally. At the same time the American military was excluded from Laos by the 1954 Geneva Accords on Indochina, which allowed only the French to advise the Royal Laotian Government (RLG). In Laos the CIA had the field all to itself, with the military supporting its actions, rather than the other way around.

  After the 1954 agreement, Laos had had a chance for independence with stability. A little country with a small political elite, leaders of all persuasions were well known to one another, many related. Prime examples were two princes of the royal blood, Souphanouvong, a leader of the Communist movement, and his half-brother Souvanna Phouma, a proponent of neutralism. The French had residual influence in Laos while the American presence, established after Geneva, grew slowly through the 1950s.

  The Eisenhower administration had no mind to accept a neutralist solution. Much as he did with Sukarno, Nehru, and Nasser, Ike insisted that Laos side with the West in the Cold War and spent two years discouraging formation of a coalition government. American aid began in 1955. By 1960 the United States had provided Laos more than $250 million, two-thirds of it to pay the entire cost of maintaining RLG armed forces.

  The CIA station played a critical role in political action. Showing their predilection for “third force” options, the secret warriors backed a pro-American Committee for the Defense of National Interests (CDNI), formed after a 1958 electoral upset in which Souphanouvong’s party gained the majority of the seats contested while the prince himself was elected by the largest margin in every district of the country. The young people who formed CDNI were called les jeunes. In the Laotian political capital, Vientiane, many of them represented the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and they were reformist but conservative, anti-Communist, and had the rare advantage of crossing clan and party lines. It quickly became an open secret that American special services supported CDNI. The 1958 elections were supposed to complete reintegrating the nation, which was under military control by different factions, just like warlord China. The socialist Lao People’s Front (Neo Lao Hak Xat, or NLHX) and especially its parent, the Laotian Communists, or Pathet Lao, dominated in two provinces. In November 1958 Prince Souphanouvong accepted the king’s authority, and Pathet Lao troops in these provinces joined the Royal Lao Armed Forces (RLAF) while the NLHX was to be represented in a neutralist coalition under Souvanna Phouma. But the accord disintegrated when the Souvanna cabinet fell in July 1958.

  Suddenly les jeunes took center stage, gaining seats in a cabinet formed in August even though some ministers had lost their elections. Pathet Lao ministers were dismissed. Trouble quickly followed within the RLAF as the Pathet Lao troops revolted, rekindling the Laotian civil war. The Eisenhower administration increased aid when fighting resumed, and increased it again as conflict deepened. The CIA station, the American conduit to CDNI, grew especially important in the U.S. embassy.

  All was not well there. The ambassador favored Souvanna’s neutralist solution and considered his policy had been sabotaged by the CIA. Station chief Henry Heckscher refused to tell his boss about some agency activities. Ambassador Horace Smith took his grievance to Allen Dulles early in 1959, demanding Heckscher’s transfer. The DCI knew of Heckscher’s arrogance but also his resourcefulness. Dulles backed the station chief and at the end of his tour even assigned Heckscher to northeast Thailand, where he mounted cross-border operations into Laos. Taking that into consideration, Heckscher outlasted his ambassador, for Smith was replaced in the summer of 1960 by Winthrop G. Brown, a former Wall Street lawyer and ambassador to New Delhi.

  Only three weeks after Brown’s arrival, the pro-U.S. government was overthrown by the paratroops of Captain Kong Le. A veteran of the French campaign for Dien Bien Phu, Kong Le remained inscrutable to most Americans, who disbelieved neutralist declarations and harbored the theory that he must be a Communist or “fellow traveler.” American perceptions aside, Kong Le became the strongman and asked Souvanna Phouma to form a new cabinet. Winthrop Brown counseled Washington to cooperate with Souvanna, the most pro-Western leader sustainable in Laos. Brown believed that CIA station chief Gordon L. Jorgensen agreed.

  In fact the Eisenhower administration was pursuing its own game in Laos, with the CIA at the center of it and Jorgensen squarely on board. Eisenhower sent in a covert military advisory group euphemistically called the Program Evaluation Office. Beginning in the summer of 1959 Ike added more than a hundred Special Forces men under the code name “White Star.” Grayston Lynch, the CIA boat man, first connected with the agency while in Laos with this unit. White Star worked with the RLAF whose strongman, Gen. Phoumi Nosavan, one of the jeunes, denounced neutralism and launched a coup that toppled Souvanna. The CIA had a case officer with Phoumi, John Hasey, who lived next door and shared his aspirations. At the same time Campbell James worked directly with Souvanna.