A Young Spy's Unforgettable Thanksgiving
I spent November 28, 1968 at an orphanage in Saigon. It was where I really began learn the war was unwinnable.
I ARRIVED IN SAIGON a couple of days before Thanksgiving in 1968. I had yet to receive my permanent assignment to run a spy operation up north, so I had a few free days on my hands. Somebody – I can't remember who, maybe one of my superiors—suggested we volunteer to help out at a local Catholic orphanage.
Thinking back on that, it was just another strange moment in the war. I mean, the Vietnamese certainly didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. I don’t know why somebody thought we could make what was purely an American holiday happier for the overtaxed Vietnamese nuns and bereft kids who had no idea of what it was all about. Looking back, It was just another reflexive effort to impose American values, no matter how trite, not to mention ironic, on the Vietnamese.
In any event, everybody seemed to have a good time that afternoon. We’d brought toys and food to pass out. At some point it occurred to me that I’d gotten far more out of those few hours than the nuns and orphaned kids, some of whom had lost limbs, and whose smiles and momentary gratitude could not mask the trauma the war had brought on.
I had a few more days to wander the city and practice my Vietnamese, which I’d spent the previous year learning at the Defense Language School, during which time I’d grown increasingly disenchanted with the war, so much so that I’d asked to be transferred into the medical corps. (Desertion was never a consideration.) My request was rejected, on grounds that my very expensive and sensitive intelligence training could not be put at risk in the war zone, where I could be captured and tortured into giving up names and sources and methods.
So now I was in Saigon. The scales were even more rapidly falling from my eyes as I wandered the teeming capital. The once-upon-a-time elegant French colonial downtown had been turned into a free-market honky-tonk zone with young women forced into prostitution by the war in the countryside, serving up whiskey, sex and heroin to GIs. I struck up conversations with a few. Meanwhile, thousands of destitute refugees were camped out on the muddy banks of the putrid Saigon River, many sheltering in huts jury-rigged from discarded cardboard stereo-equipment boxes with brand names like Sony, Kenwood and Pioneer.
One day I met a friend from intelligence school for drinks at a sidewalk cafe down by the docks. He’d been in Saigon for nearly a year, running a spy op against the communist underground. A caravan of unmarked army trucks rumbled by, fresh off an American transport ship.
“Know where they’re going?” he asked with a sardonic smile.
Nope.
“Straight to Cambodia,” he said, lifting a glass in a mocking toast. Straight to the North Vietnamese troops in the jungle across the border, he meant.
I had no idea then how the communists could manage that, but I was beginning to get the picture, which would sharpen considerably over the ensuing weeks as I wandered the city and engaged Vietnamese in conversation.
The war was a loser. Anybody could see that. And yet it went on and on. You didn’t need to be a spy to see that.
These days in D.C., all these years later, I occasionally get together for lunch with a wizened CIA officer who spent years in Indochina, first in Vietnam but also Laos and Thailand. Of course we always end up talking about the war in one fashion or another.
“It only took me three weeks in Saigon to realize the war was a loser,” I said one day earlier this year, probably not for the first time.
“Took me three minutes,” he chortled.
And yet we soldiered on. That’s a whole ‘nother story, as they say.
Prima Facie
All this is a long way around saying, as Yogi put it, “You can observe a lot by just watching.” And to ask: How is it that so many U.S. national security officials over the decades have so often missed the big picture that “just watching” would have shown them? Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Israel and the Palestinians—you name it.
The late Robert White, a distinguished American Ambassador to El Salvador during the early years of the civil war there, argued in channels that the corrupt, murderous regime wasn’t worthy of our support. It got him fired by Ronald Reagan, who put that tiny, benighted nation of campesinos, impoverished over hundreds of years by greedy landowners, on the Cold War chessboard. The ensuing civil war would eventually be settled by negotiations, but only after some 70,000 Salvadorans had been killed and a million displaced by our backing of the extreme rightwing regime. Nobody can call that a win.
Eventually, in an interview with me not long after he returned to Washington, White offered that foreign service officers walking around the capital and countryside of not just El Salvador but much of the rest of Latin America, had gained a better understanding of what was really going on than the CIA, whose views, he thought, were comprised by its close relations with rabidly anti-communist local internal security services and police.
Likewise, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan may well have relied too much on the assurances of Benjamin Netanyahu’s security services that the concerns of ordinary Palestinians, not to mention Hamas, could be ignored in pursuit of the so-called Abraham Accords, the much ballyhooed diplomatic initiative that was meant to establish peaceful relations between Israel, Gulf Arab governments and other Muslim-led states. In the wake of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, intelligence sources tell me, the CIA ceded intelligence-gathering on the Palestinians to the Israelis.
Sullivan, in a now notorious incident, wrote a 7,000 word piece for Foreign Affairs magazine that appeared last month without paragraphs from his original that purred, “Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades” Not only that, Sullivan had claimed that “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence.”
Hoo-boy. It makes you wonder when the last time was that U.S. diplomats or spies walked around the West Bank or Gaza and talked to ordinary Palestinians. Over lunch a few days ago, a former U.S. intelligence officer told me he spent plenty of time some years back under diplomatic cover talking to Palestinians. Hamas’s Oct. 7 rampage was not much of a surprise to him, he said: Something had to give after years of escalating settler violence spurred on by Netanyahu’s ultra rightwing government, which includes outspoken racists in prominent roles.
CIA Director Bill Burns has regretted not speaking out more forcefully in 2003 against the impending invasion of Iraq, when he was a senior State Department official. It hardly needs saying it’s too late now for any of his minions to walk around the West Bank, much less the obliterated Gaza Strip.
But elsewhere in world—I’m thinking volatile places like Turkey and Egypt, not to mention Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe—U.S. diplomats and spies could do worse than visiting an orphanage on Thanksgiving. Its place like that where the learning really begins.
Wow! An excellent read with insights you only get on SpyTalk.
My year with the First Infantry Division was 66-67 as a 97B CI Agent. I never hit a wall of disillusionment. I do wonder what happened to you in language school. Later on, with CIA, in Vietnam in a Province, we had just ended military ops support and I was free most of the time to do as I pleased. I wanted honest reporting and no BS. They liked my reports in Nha Trang. I liked my working conditions. I got my best information from the Korean troops. I reported when the USA Air Force pulled out and left all their mines in the ground. Local VC paid for every land mine the locals could deactivate.