I suspect that most of my SubStack friends know a lot about HUMINT. After a conversation with Jeff Stein of SpyTalk, however, it has been on my mind a lot. As it turns out we both served as case officers for the 525th Intelligence Brigade in Vietnam, but at different times. He worked up north, in the Danang area while I served in the Central Highlands – a small town called Ban Me Thuot. On reminiscing we both agreed that our Vietnam assignments were one of the highlights of our career; something we found both challenging and rewarding. I hope you will indulge me a look back.
For me it began with the Battalion Commander in Nha Trang indicating rather bruskly that my assigned operation plan had been on the books for some time, and several case officers had tried but failed to get it off the ground. He warned me that after a few months in Ban Me Thout, if I didn’t get it going, he wouldn’t hesitate to find someone else who could. Fortunately, I got lucky. My first few weeks being a unilateral case officer while others on the team were working with Vietnamese counterparts proved daunting to say the least. Since the ops plan called for working in a third country, in my case Cambodia, all the paperwork went not just to my battalion, but the 525 in Saigon and then on to CIA headquarters.
While my colleagues were focused on what was happening in the province around us, I focused entirely on Cambodia. More specifically, the project I inherited proposed that I recruit an active-duty member of the NVA operating in Cambodia who could provide information about activity along the Ho Chi Minh trail. I wasn’t experienced enough to realize that finding such an operative, let alone recruiting one, had about as much chance of succeeding as me winning the Maryland lottery. How was I to know? No one at Fort Holabird had ever told me that the recruitment of a penetration agent was rare even for the CIA. Despite strenuous efforts during the Cold War, we depended on “walk-ins” or someone else’s operatives for most of our human intelligence, not our own well-placed spies. Hollywood may have been pretty good at pulling off such operations, but not the rest of us.
I remain convinced that recruiting a penetration agent, even under the best of conditions, is ninety-nine percent luck, no matter how good the tradecraft one might employ, or how much time and money is invested in the task. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but those who believe that the answer to our intelligence problems is producing more and better HUMINT must recognize that pigs will learn to fly before the information obtained from penetration agents significantly increases. Luck doesn’t work that way. It is not easily manufactured.
Because I didn’t know any better, none of this negative thinking even crossed my mind. From my perspective, I couldn’t have asked for a better assignment. Turned out, at least for me, that the trying was enormously interesting and challenging. So much so that it made a year in Vietnam pass quickly, and if the army hadn’t canceled its “Great Skills” program, I would be happy doing what I was doing for the rest of my life. Good thing I didn’t get my wish because my lifelong struggle with foreign languages made me a poor candidate for a career in operations. In Vietnam, I could get by using an interpreter, but I would have been a lousy case officer anywhere else.
At that moment, I was so absorbed in what I was doing that none of that other stuff mattered. I was determined to put some life into the plan I had been given. My mission was to get that penetration agent, and to collect tons of information on activity just across the border inside Cambodia. My first hurdle was to come up with a scheme to create something out of nothing. The plan on the books was long on ultimate objectives, but short on how I should achieve its goals.
Having never done such things before helped in these early days. It’s hard to get discouraged when you don’t recognize the dumb mistakes you are making, or let it bother you that there might be a more efficient way to do what I was trying to do. I just plowed ahead hoping for the best. I got a lucky break when the detachment commander, taking pity on me, handed over a castoff from one of the Darlac Province operations. Although no one else wanted him, and his production up to that point was zero, acquiring him was a godsend to me. I now had a recruited agent that could go to work immediately, a huge deal. Without him it would have been months at best before I could have found and recruited my first source. I suspect that the lack of information gained from a first agent largely explains why my predecessors had so much trouble moving forward. With only a year to work with – the length of the typical tour in Vietnam – even a few months delay could prove disastrous.
At first glance, my hand-me-down agent didn’t look like all that much of a prize. He didn’t have any contact with, or even know anyone in the NVA. He had never traveled to Cambodia, and he wasn’t interested in going there any time soon. On closer inspection, however, I soon learned that he had a lot going for him. I was especially impressed to discover he was literate in both Vietnamese and French. He also spoke several Montagnard dialects and even knew how to read a map. I didn’t discover how rare it was to find sources with such capabilities until sometime later. As we talked, and I got to know him better, it also became clear that he was respected widely in the Montagnard community, and that his business interests required him to travel frequently in Darlac and the neighboring province to the south, Quang Duc. Both bordered Cambodia.
I guess that others hadn’t seen his potential, because he was far from a perfect fit for the Cambodia plan as it had been written and approved. The plan envisioned that the US case officer would work directly with the in-place sources, even including the hoped-for recruit from the NVA. In hindsight, it is hard for me to understand why anybody thought such an operation would work in the first place. My first task was to seek approval for modifying the plan so that it better fit the resources and circumstances at hand, starting with designating my existing source as a “principal agent” or PA, which meant that I would train him, and he in turn would work more closely with any new agents we recruited. He proved quite adept at this, especially at the task of finding potential sources, and assessing their relevancy to our mission, which had been modified to include building up a network of agents on both sides of the border who would report on activities along the Ho Chi Minh trail and, if possible, eventually find us that NVA mole. Some of these agents would be used solely for communicating with agents inside Cambodia and other logistics activities, while others were tasked with finding more people along the trail who would be willing to work for the United States.
I discovered that finding and recruiting agents in Vietnam and Cambodia required the same enormous amount of paperwork as it would for an operation in either Moscow or Damascus. The detailed planning and careful vetting made sense, and I understood the need for operational security, but I found the insistence on the same level of background information a bit much. Few of my potential recruits were accustomed to keeping meticulous records of the places where they had lived, beginning with the most recent and working back seven years, the schools they attended, or sometimes even the year they were born. In one instance, I entered the date of birth as “about 1940/the year the brown pig died;” the address as “third longhouse on the left;” and present employment as “Wood Chopper.” As you would have thought that when one of my recruits answered yes to the question “Have you ever knowingly engaged in any acts or activities designed to overthrow the United States Government by force?” it would cause a stir somewhere up the line. No, but they were insistent that my Viet Cong recruit provide his mother-in-law’s maiden name.
Despite these and other bureaucratic hurdles, the modified plan began to produce results, proving that sometime pigs can fly. The agents my PA and I recruited started reporting on what the North Vietnamese were up to in the border area. This was not information fit for the President, or even General Westmoreland mind you, but at that point I didn’t care. I figured something was better than nothing. Plus, I still had hope that we might yet place a spy in the NVA.
As it was, we happened upon a source that claimed he made periodic forays into Cambodia to search for wood, and he frequently stopped to visit with a relative purported to be the chief of a Montagnard village that provided laborers to a nearby NVA supply depot and rest area. If true, this was potentially a big deal and a step closer to that hoped for, but ever illusive, NVA spy. Unfortunately, when I met the man face to face, I learned that he was illiterate, something the PA had failed to mention to me. Everything else checked out, and I decided he was too valuable to walk away from just because he didn’t read or write. I dubbed him “Numb Nuts,” as an AKA on his security form, not out of disrespect, but as my attempt to give the finger to those back in Washington generating paper requirements that may have made sense in Paris, but not in Ban Me Thuot. After receiving approval from CIA, I recruited him to join the team. Despite his shortcomings he was never a disappointment. Working with him was not always easy, and he caused his share of complications, but in the end, he was well worth the extra trouble.
My favorite “Numb” story is the adventures he encountered on his first trip for me to Cambodia. He indicated that one of his relatives, a village chief, hated the Vietnamese and would likely jump at the chance of working for the United States. I told him that was fine, but before we could recruit him, I needed more information. His mission was to collect the background data I needed to get permission to make the recruitment. He memorized the list of questions I gave him easily, but I decided his remembering all the answers was not a good bet. He assured me that his relative, the village chief, was an “educated man” who could read and write. To take advantage of this uncommon opportunity, I had a secret compartment built into a Montagnard backpack that was designed to carry firewood. The plan was that once the chief finished writing his answers on a piece of paper, “Numb” was to hide it in the backpack and return it to me. I briefly considered requiring the answers be done using “secret writing” techniques for security reasons but decided that while the village chief might get it, “Numb” probably was not quite ready for it yet.
Crossing into Cambodia from Vietnam wasn’t like going to the corner store, even for a Montagnard. The NVA had put out the word that anyone attempting to cross the border alone would be shot on sight. At that point, headquarters had not yet given me permission to use teams for cross-border operations, so “Numb,” if he was to make the trip, would have to do it alone. Despite the danger involved, he agreed to take the assignment, and I made arrangements for him to contact me upon his return. As we parted, he agreed that he and his elephant would leave first thing in the morning for Cambodia.
A couple of weeks later, I spotted the mark signaling that he was back from Cambodia, and as planned, I met him the next day at our prearranged meeting site. The first thing I wanted to know was if he had met with the village chief. “Numb” said that he had. Then I asked him about the long list of questions, mostly security questionnaire stuff, that some bureaucrat back in Washington needed. Apparently, it didn’t strike anybody as odd, maybe even a bit goofy, that we were asking sources like “Numb” to risk life and limb, to make it possible for me to fill out a bureaucratic standard security form (the SF-86) to determine what street a potential source lived on, his house and telephone number, etc., in a society where people lived their whole life in the jungle, practicing slash and burn agriculture, calling thatched roof “longhouses” home, and determined the timing of important events, such as birthdays, by associating them with some traumatic event, such as the year the longhouse burnt down. I complained a few times, but it was clear nobody was listening, or worse, didn’t care.
When “Numb” didn’t immediately answer my question, I knew something must be wrong, so I asked him again, “Where are my answers?” His reply was spoken so softly that my interpreter had to ask him to speak louder. When he finally did, the answer was a resounding no. “I don’t have the piece of paper you gave me. I don’t have any answers.” Based on this, I immediately assumed that there must have been difficulties along the way, and maybe he hadn’t even made the journey. I hurriedly asked him again if he had made the trip. “Yes,” he replied meekly. “I just got back yesterday.” Now I was really puzzled so my follow up question was, “Why then didn’t you bring back the information I need?” He looked down at his feet, took off his cap, put it back on, started to speak, then stopped. Finally, almost in a whisper he continued, “I got there with the questions, but we didn’t have anything to write with. There was too much for me to remember.” What can you say at a moment like that? I obviously had screwed up. My brilliant plan had failed because of a small, but crucial detail I had overlooked – you can’t fill out paperwork if you don’t have something to write with. At that moment, I did the only thing I could think of, I reached into my fatigue jacket, handed “Numb” a number two yellow pencil, and said, “Okay go back and do it again.”
He did. In fact, over the next several months he made the trip from Vietnam to Cambodia numerous times. On each occasion he reminded me of the dangers involved. He wanted several of the woodcutters he employed to go with him. He explained that was how it was done and doing it some other way would look particularly suspicious to the Vietnamese. I contacted headquarters and, after several attempts, received permission to initiate a team concept. Instead of sending
“Numb” by himself, he and two or three of his woodchoppers would cross the border together. The others were unaware of his real mission. They were there to chop wood, but it made it much safer for “Numb” to accomplish what I needed done.
It turned out that his friend, the village leader, was telling the truth. Many of the people from his village worked up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail in the employ of the North Vietnamese military. These new sources were able to provide information about activity levels, location of cache sites, and the names of several NVA officers. Their reporting was not earthshaking. It would have never made the President’s Daily Brief (PDB). But at least the operation was up and running. I used these early contacts to recruit other village chiefs up and down the trail opposite Darlac and Quang Duc provinces. It took me a while to realize what capability these assets really had.
While reading raw reports one day, I noticed something strange. One of the sources had reported the type of equipment inside one of the underground cache sites in detail. The question for me was, “How in the world did he get inside the actual cache site itself?” I contacted “Numb” right away and asked that he check with the source in Cambodia to determine exactly how he knew so many details about the site. A few days later, I get a report back that indicated the source frequently visited cache sites along the trail on a motorbike with his uncle, an officer in the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). The uncle, a Montagnard, had been sent to North Vietnam for training sometime earlier. He was now a captain in the NVA. By chance we had stumbled into the possibility of eventually recruiting a North Vietnamese military officer. Like I said before, luck is everything. My time was about up, but I was told my replacement was able to recruit the captain successfully achieving the goal established by the original ops plan.
Although I learned a bit about recruiting agents, I didn’t have an occasion to run into an asset or find a useful idiot in Vietnam. That came later when I retired from CIA to open my own international consulting firm. Over the years I had developed contacts in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Israel. I took advantage of these assets to gain information that US corporations found useful in marketing their wares. These folks didn’t need to be recruited. They shared insider information freely. In return I kept them up to date on happenings in Washington, both the executive and legislative branches of government. Back at home lunches, and an occasional dinner, with officials gave me all the information I needed for my next trip to Asia.
An academic expert on Japan and Korea who I contacted occasionally came closest to my having a useful idiot. He was “…vain, narcissistic, highly susceptible to flattery, and greedy,” 1 making it easy for me to influence him to write and speak to the media on issues important to me. Compared to recruiting a VC agent bending a useful idiot to my will was a piece of cake. Although the tradecraft I had learned at Fort Holabird and practiced in Vietnam was helpful, it only took a couple of dinners at the then finest Chinese restaurant in DC – Mr. K’s – to establish a useful relationship with my idiot.
1 Craig Unger, “American Kompromat” Penguin Random House LLC, 2021, page 44
Fascinating recollection, Carl. And it really took me back to a particular state of mind . I could feel and smell the place and the people in your account. Thanks so much for writing it.