“A Typical Child of the Middle Class”

When my younger brother Jeff died the summer of ‘69 at the ungodly young age of 27, I vowed to write a memoir of his short but interesting life. He had been a Vietnam GI well before the war became front page news. He came home and helped create the GI antiwar movement. What occurred in the interim was a compelling story. 

Though there were seven years between us and I was away for much of his growing up, I thought I knew Jeff pretty well. What I didn’t know about him I figured I could fill in from the small archive of letters and documents he left behind.

Jeff age 10, summer camp, Adirondack Mts, 1952

It seems I was under an illusion – it turned out I really didn’t know my kid brother that well. He had grown up, experienced things I had no idea of, and generally, unbeknownst to me, had carved out an important niche in the history of his time – the ‘60s. But much of that I learned only decades later.

However, before tackling a memoir my first order of brotherly duty was to try to get Jeff his ’15 minutes’ of fame – an obit in the New York Times. Returning from the funeral, I shut myself in my study for several days going through his papers to piece together an outline of the final decade of his life.

I had hoped an extended resume would serve as notes for an obituary. I knew getting him a Times obit was a long shot, but I intended giving it a helluva try. I didn’t know anyone at the paper except, by reputation, a senior writer and editor. I was then a young academic – a specialist on the Soviet Union – and Harrison Salisbury of the Times was a well-known author who’d been on the Moscow beat.

There was little chance he had heard of me – I hadn’t yet published that much – but invoking our common interest, I sent him my notes on Jeff, hoping he might use his good offices to recommend an obit, even a short one. Alas, I heard nothing from the Times until more than a week later when a short note from Mr Salisbury arrived.

He had found Jeff’s brief life interesting and worthy of special notice and had passed the material on to the Times’ obituary editor, but unfortunately it was too late. The paper then had a rule – no obits older than three days, and in my grief I had taken nearly a week to assemble Jeff’s timeline.

It’s not that Jeff’s death was unnoted – there were several obits in his hometown papers in upstate New York and many death notices in the underground antiwar press throughout the country, but he would not make it into the Times, so I filed away the notes for another day.

Many years later I finally began researching a memoir on my brother, a project of discovery both exhilarating and humbling. Learning about Jeff took me back to that sad week following his death, June ‘69. I dug out the notes I had originally written for the Times nearly a half century ago.

Rereading them, I was surprised at how much about Jeff I had been able to glean from his papers, but I was also taken aback at the important pieces of his life I’d been then unaware of. In ‘searching’ for Jeff over the past several years, my research assistant Karen Grote Ferb – herself a close friend of Jeff’s long ago – and I drew on the memories of his countless contemporaries in both war and antiwar, and have since filled in most of the gaps.

That left me wondering about how much a memoir begun in the summer of ’69 would have missed of Jeff’s journey. Before the age of the Internet, I could not have located the majority of our interlocutors. Cast your mind back to that era of typewriters, snail mail, expensive long distance phone calls, and city phone books as sources.

By the time of his death, Jeff’s GI buddies had returned stateside and scattered to the four corners of the country while many of his college SDS co-activists had graduated and gone hither and yon in pursuit of careers. And at that time in the late ‘60s, Jeff’s comrades in the GI antiwar movement – mostly people on the left – were still in the thick of battle, often living semi-underground, and occasionally operating under pseudonyms to escape FBI surveillance.

For the New York Times back in ’69, I had introduced Jeff as “a typical child of the middle class” and briefly summarized his Vietnam experience:

          He learned Vietnamese at the Army Language School

          in Monterey, California and later worked as an interpreter

          and translator in Saigon and in Phu Bai, an outpost north

          of Hue. [President] Diem was overthrown at the time Jeff was             

          working in Saigon, and he had left the country just a few months

          before the Gulf of Tonkin incident [in ‘64].

Indeed, Jeff was trained as a Vietnamese linguist, and he had finished his Vietnam tour not long before Tonkin – a major turning point in the slow burning war – but as Karen and I subsequently found out, dramatic things happened between those two moments of his life.

I had missed the fact that Jeff had spent his first eight months overseas at a secret facility in the Philippines translating North Vietnamese military intercepts – until late one evening when he and several fellow linguists were ordered to ship out to Vietnam on short notice.

  

The 'Elephant Cage', giant antenna array at the secret facility where Jeff worked  in the Philippines, 1963

President Kennedy had given a covert ‘green light’ to a group of South Vietnamese generals plotting the overthrow of the inept and ineffective Diem, President of South Vietnam, and his brother Nhu, the much despised commander of private armies and secret police.

Jeff and the team were hurriedly flown to Saigon to take part in a US undercover operation in support of the coup. Billeted near the Saigon airport, they performed their highly classified, politically sensitive duties in a remote, off limits corner of a US base near the village of Phu Lam.

         

In fact, I was wrong in the resume; Jeff was not in Saigon when the coup went off. Their assignment completed, he and his detachment had gone back to the Philippines two weeks earlier. However, less than two months later as another coup against the new president was in the offing, Jeff and the linguists were rushed back to Saigon.

         

Since the second coup went off quickly and bloodlessly, Jeff was reassigned to Phu Bai, a small US listening post just below the North Vietnamese border. There he and others maintained radio contact with South Vietnamese commandos being infiltrated into the north. Both of Jeff’s clandestine missions – in Phu Lam and at Phu Bai – remained highly classified, and he had never spoken or written about them.

         

I was also in the dark in ’69 when I wrote Harrison Salisbury at the Times that Jeff came back from Vietnam, finished college, and won a coveted Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, which he took to the University of Chicago for graduate school. I hadn’t known that upon withdrawing from grad school to launch his soon-to-be famous GI antiwar paper, Vietnam GI, Jeff had financed it with his fellowship funds – for a prospective academic, a step unheard of then or now.

         

Elsewhere in the resume under the heading, Other radical activities, I  simply listed that Jeff “Attended a conference of Japanese peace groups against the Vietnam War in Kyoto, Japan, August, 1968,” an event that turned out to have a rather dramatic back story.

         

Dave Dellinger, chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the MOBE), thus, the titular head of the US antiwar movement, had asked Jeff to join a delegation of leading American antiwar activists headed for Budapest to meet with representatives of the National Liberation Front, the underground political arm of the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam.

         

Jeff reluctantly had to decline; he had worked under the aegis of the National Security Agency in Vietnam and was still subject to restrictions on travel behind the Iron Curtain. Instead, Dellinger sent him to Japan under the guise of serving as a speaker at an international peace conference, but actually for a very different and delicate purpose.

         

The Japanese peace movement, Beheiren, encouraged US military personnel to desert the Vietnam War and was secretly hiding some 20 deserters. However, the young GIs had become restless and ill-disciplined and hard for the peace activists to cope with.

Beheiren requested the American movement to send someone knowledgeable about GI protest to counsel them on what to do. Jeff, as an ex-GI and authoritative leader of the GI movement, was the ideal candidate.

         

Suffice it to say, in my initial attempt to reconstruct Jeff’s life there were other gaps and missing parts that Karen and I eventually closed and filled in,  including perhaps the two greatest omissions.

         

I had failed to convey any sense of Jeff as a person. As my younger sibling by many years, I assumed that an older brother’s perceptions would not have been of interest to the historical record I was trying for at the Times.

         

In the ultimate illusion, as I was to repeatedly discover with each new interview of Jeff’s contemporaries, I really didn’t know the brother who had gone off to war and returned to achieve his destiny as an antiwar leader. When I asked a half a dozen of his closest friends for a single word to describe Jeff, each without hesitation independently replied with ‘charisma’.

         

I was astonished. That was an aspect of Jeff that hadn’t been apparent to me or our parents when we occasionally got together in his last years. A very nice guy, well-spoken, and mature, but I had never thought of my kid brother as a charismatic leader. I was of course pleased to learn this of him.

Jeff back at Indiana University, 1965

Jeff had other personal qualities that I had also missed. In Karen’s words, “his sense of humor and joie de vivre on the one hand and his dark side on the other; his drive, his passion, his vision, his charisma, his foibles.”

         

Finally, the biggest surprise of all has been that Jeff had come back from Vietnam a troubled soul with a secret about his involvement that he could never bring himself to speak of, and eventually carried to the grave.

No, he didn’t kill anyone – neither enemy combatant nor innocent civilian; he was in an intelligence agency, not a combat unit – but once in an anguished voice he had said to Karen, “If you knew what I did in Vietnam, you’d hate me.” That was as much as he would say despite her repeated denials and assurances.

Karen and I queried his numerous friends, asking if Jeff had ever spoken of his troubling secret, but to no avail. Admittedly memories grow dim after so many years, but that was the kind of thing someone wasn’t likely to have forgotten. The best we’ve been able to come up has been an unverifiable ‘maybe’ and a couple of hypotheticals.

         

One person thought she remembered Jeff relating a painful memory of an interrogation, but we found no one else who had ever heard even a hint about it.  In a hypothetical guess, a fellow ex-GI linguist who had served with an airborne unit involved in unintended collateral damage (civilian deaths), believed Jeff may have done the same thing with the Marines on long range patrols, but we’ve been unable to unearth any firm evidence.

         

A more recent speculation has been that Jeff may have been dispatched from Phu Bai to nearby Hue a few times to sit in on harsh South Vietnamese Army interrogations of Viet Cong prisoners to pick up any information of interest to his unit. Witnessing such brutal interrogations would not have been something easily forgotten, but as I shall say in the memoir, it seems we’ll never know.

         

Jeff never got his 15 minutes in the Times, but his niche in the history of the Vietnam antiwar movement is now secure with both a book and an award-winning documentary dedicated to him, a page in a mainstream American history text about his editorship of Vietnam GI, and a literary prize established in his name among other recognitions and honors.

Rear Echelon Blues – Then Came War

[Dear Reader:  The time is at last at hand to turn full-time to writing the memoir. To facilitate the writing, the blog will continue to post, but now monthly on the 1st Wednesday of each month beginning August 6th.  We will keep you informed about our progress to publication.]

         

Duty in the Philippines (PI) seemed like a playground to my brother Jeff Sharlet, stationed there in early ’63. It was a bit like being back on a college campus, but instead of going to classes the GIs worked shifts on classified material. They were Vietnamese linguists (lingys) in a communications intelligence outfit, the Army Security Agency (ASA), an adjunct of the NSA, the National Security Agency. Off-duty, their time was theirs, and Jeff made the most of it as if on prolonged spring break.

However, by June he was growing weary of the routine in the PI. You might call it the rear echelon blues. The action was elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Also the drenching rains of the monsoon season, which began in May,   had a depressing effect. And the work translating intercepted North Vietnamese military communications, initially interesting to Jeff, had become predictable and tedious.

Equally tiresome was the usual GI social scene of starting out at the Airmen’s Club at Clark Air Force Base (AFB) with its cheap drinks, then moving on to the low-life bars of Angeles City – the nearby GI town -- and the occasional trips to the more upscale watering holes of Manila, the capital. Jeff was becoming jaded with endless pub crawling.

The PI scene had become all too familiar to him until the abrupt call to war suddenly changed everything, as we’ll see in the following excerpts from his letters home.

2 Jun 63 – back from leave at the 9^th ASA, Clark AFB, the Philippines

          I recently returned from Hong Kong. It’s a great place, sort of an orientalized San Francisco or an anglicized Chinese city.

Hong Kong harbor

Thanks for the book on Southeast Asia. I haven’t read it yet, but I have little hope for the future of this region. The present situation is the fault of the British, French, Dutch, and American colonialists.

4 Jun 63

Last night I went to town, the night before I went to town, the night before that I went to town. Tonight I will go to town, tomorrow night I’ll go to town, the next night I’ll go to town, as a matter of fact I go to town frequently.

          I also sing with the Clark Glee Club to improve Philippine-American relations.

♫ Just an old sweet song

Keeps Georgia on my mind†

19 Jun 63

          Well, I’ve completed about a third of my tour of duty. My only useful activity is singing in the Clark Glee Club. We sang on Manila TV on a Jack Paar-type show last week. Our group is very popular with the American and Filipino communities.

          We sing some songs in Tagalog.* We sang at the joint US military aid group in Manila for all the generals and admirals who advise this country on its defenses. They gave us a filet mignon and lobster dinner.

          Last week we sang at an officer’s club on an American naval base where we got roast beef. I was talking to a Navy captain’s wife in the bar, and she told me single Navy officers find this a very boring assignment, as do peons like me.

          Nice Asian girls, except in westernized Japan and Hong Kong, do not go out with Caucasians. It is not socially acceptable. Therefore, all GIs from lieutenants to privates are relegated to bar girls.

Right now I’m off the hostess kick and spending less time in the local GI town. I’m going more often to Manila where the people are a little more worldly.

♫ Hit the road, Jack

And don’t you come back’

No more, no more††

          I never realized how great the little conveniences of the States were. For instance – toilet seats, sidewalks, paved streets, air-conditioned buses, trash collectors, clean food, clean people, and the absence of bugs and dust.

          Here when you travel on an intercity bus, if someone has to go to the bathroom, he yells, the driver stops, people get off, women squat on one side, men on the other.

          At least with the rain, everything’s no longer brown; the sugar cane and rice shoots are green now. All in all, I try to make the best of a hurting situation.

Monsoon downpour

30 Jun 63

          My ‘whole goal in life’ is not to go into town drinking every night. I have some good friends here in the unit who are extremely intelligent, mostly guys from the Army Language School (ALS).

We travel together, have great intellectual discussions over beers, and do other things. I’m making the best of it. I do a lot of reading and keep busy all the time.

I think about important problems in the States and the world. For example, three cops beating a Negro woman in Birmingham, a fanatic assassinates a Negro leader in Jackson, Mississippi, and another fanatic in Atlanta slashing a sit-in student. Filipinos ask about these incidents, and there is little one can say.

23 Jul 63

          I have read most of the books you sent, but I’m still reading the last few. I just finished ‘Dr. Zhivago’ and I’m now reading ‘The Marxists’ by C Wright Mills.

          Southeast Asia is an amazingly complicated problem. In my own mind, I haven’t yet come up with a way of offsetting Chinese Communist influence and keeping these states non-communist.

For instance, Burma has pro-Chinese Communists and more nationalist Communists; it’s not a cohesive entity in any sense, politically, ethnically, or geographically. This situation is repeated in every Southeast Asian state.

19 Aug 63 on leave in Tokyo

This is a very beautiful country, which is much like the US economically and physically, but very different culturally. It has been an interesting and educational experience.

 Japan in bloom

Then a week later, a sudden brief, cryptic message home.

27 Aug 63 from the Clark AFB flight line 

I’m leaving for Vietnam for some ‘field work’.

♫ If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone

You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles†††

Back story: Jeff and a small team of Vietnamese lingys were abruptly dispatched from the PI as the internal political crisis in South Vietnam intensified during summer ‘63. Relations between the Catholic political elite around President Diem and the Buddhist clergy had worsened.

A Buddhist monk publicly burned himself to death in protest against the regime. The shock waves were felt throughout the country and beyond as the horrific news photo went around the world.

When a second Buddhist self-immolation occurred soon after, the South Vietnamese military elite cautiously inquired of the American Embassy what the US attitude might be toward a coup.

The war against the Viet Cong was not going well, and by then President Kennedy (JFK) had lost patience with Diem’s resistance to the reforms needed for winning ‘hearts & minds’ in the villages.

In late August, JFK cabled his new ambassador to ‘green light’ the South Vietnamese generals. The conspirators immediately began secretly planning an anti-Diem coup.  

Anxious to keep abreast of the clandestine developments in Saigon, the White House relied on reporting from its military and intelligence sources in the Embassy as well as the special team of ASA specialists flown in from Clark.

Jeff and his fellow lingys had been quickly assembled with full field gear and sent off posthaste to Vietnam. They were installed in a remote corner of a base outside Saigon where they worked around the clock covertly tapping all the coup-planners’ voice communications.

As to the ‘big picture’ of why they were eavesdropping on allies, the plans afoot were well above the ASA team’s pay grade and ‘Need to Know’. However, daily arrangements for the transfer of their translated intercepts to a nearby air base to be flown out to NSA-Washington, gave the team a pretty good idea of how serious the matter was.

Each day’s intelligence product was packed in ammo cans rigged with thermite grenades, then transported by jeep under armed guard. ASA’s security guards were under orders to pull the grenade pins and run like hell if there was any danger the material might be compromised and the clandestine US operation exposed to the South Vietnamese government.

15 Oct 63 ASA monitoring base at Phu Lam

          Jeff wrote me from Saigon that he and the special ASA group were pulling out and returning to the Philippines.

During the rush deployment from the PI, Jeff had forgotten to leave a forwarding address at the Clark mailroom, and while he was in Vietnam on that first tour he never wrote home.

Of course he couldn’t write about the secret operation – not even fellow ASA troops in the area with high security clearances were entitled to know – but off-duty Jeff did do other things that could be put in a letter. He was especially taken with Saigon, then called the Paris of the Orient.

 Saigon flower stall, 1963

Meanwhile, our Mother wrote him at Clark AFB, but her letter came back marked ‘UNKNOWN’. Understandably upset, she called their local Congressman who advised a letter to the Army’s Adjutant General.

She wrote the general at the Pentagon that very day, “Dear Sir: I will appreciate your advising me by return mail exactly where my son is.” Unaware of the distress he had caused our parents, Jeff casually resumed corresponding from the PI.

29 Oct 63 – back at 9^th ASA, Clark AFB

          I’m now back in the PI after 49 days in Vietnam. Don’t believe what Madame Nhu** is saying in the States. The fact remains that South Vietnam is a complete dictatorship and the Buddhists are persecuted.

          The rainy season has ended, but heat and humidity linger. Hopefully we’ll have cooler weather soon. This climate breeds lethargy.

♫ We’re having a heat wave,

A tropical heat wave††††

         

My driver’s license was supposed to be renewed by September 30^th, and I didn’t do it. I was in Vietnam at the time, in the jungle. I’ll write to Motor Vehicles and tell them I was fighting a war and to please excuse this oversight.

On 1 Nov ‘63 the South Vietnamese generals carried out their successful coup during which the president and his brother, the notorious secret police chief Nhu, were assassinated. General Minh, leader of the junta, became the new head of state, beginning a long period of political instability in Saigon.

General Minh, new head of state, 1963

Meanwhile, on the lighter side of history, our Mother’s insistent inquiry as to Jeff’s whereabouts had worked its way down the chain of command from Washington to Saigon and back to the 9^th ASA at Clark – much to his embarrassment:

5 Nov 63

          I know you must have been worried when your letter was returned to you, especially after reading about the coup in Saigon (by the way it’s the best thing that's happened in Vietnam in a decade; now the people are very happy).

          I neglected to write to tell you I had returned to the PI, but I wish you hadn’t contacted your Congressman. It caused a lot of trouble for the field station commander, my company commander (CO), and me.

I’m writing this letter because I have received a direct order from my CO to write one tonight. He even wants to see me put it in the mail.

          Please be more discreet in the future. The Army and I (although at opposite ends of the philosophical totem pole), do not relish embarrassments and inconveniences like this.

22 Nov 63

          In the middle of the night we heard of the President’s assassination. No words can describe the gloom that hangs over this place. It’s as if a little bit of everyone suddenly died. It was more than a shock – much more than a shock.

20 Dec 63

          I think the States are going to hell under the strain of the ‘Cold War’. As for me, I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to agitate in my society to better it, or retire from the struggle completely to hide in some environment like the academic community.

          Vietnam is a little quieter these days. Happy Holidays.

          The turbulent year ’63 came to a subdued end, but then just several weeks later in early ‘64 another coup took place in Saigon, and Jeff was soon on his way back to Vietnam – back to war – a story for another time.    

*Tagalog, along with English, one of the two official languages of the Philippines.

**Diem’s sister-in-law, then on a speaking tour in the US promoting the regime.

†       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZceOIAh1i0&feature=kp

††     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKvhxapM5zo&feature=kp

†††   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stwt_ew6Bac

†††† https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57qy7MCzLXA

Sojourn on the South China Sea

Jeff Sharlet hoped to be shipped to Europe, but landed on the shores of the South China Sea. He had enlisted in the Army Security Agency (ASA), a semi-secret communications intelligence outfit, the military arm of the National Security Agency in Washington. ASA sent Jeff to the Army Language School (ALS) in sunny California.

By late ’62 he’d completed the 47-week Vietnamese course, received Top Secret and Cryptographic clearances, and was soon dispatched to the 9^th ASA Field Station at Clark Air Force Base (AFB) in the Philippine Islands (PI).

Life in the islands – a quiet backwater of the global Cold War – was relatively pleasant for ASA personnel. Across the South China Sea a low intensity civil conflict was underway in Vietnam, and the Pentagon was gradually stockpiling Vietnamese linguists (lingys for short). ASA was temporarily parking most of them in the Philippines out of harm’s way.

With so many interpreter/translators on hand, the workload at the 9^th ASA was not heavy, and the troops enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. But for the war looming in Vietnam, one might call it an extended spring break in the South Pacific.

For the young college-boy lingys, it was something of an adventure. While they bided their time waiting for the call to war, daily life in the tropics resembled scenes from From Here to Eternity without the romance – a sprawling military base, a nearby GI town, palm trees swaying in the breeze. 

Excerpts from Jeff’s letters home trace his carefree time as a GI in the PI during the early months of ’63.

13 Jan 63 – from Honolulu enroute to the Far East

Hawaii is beautiful and warm. I’m on a Super-Constellation. It will take 30 hours to get to the Philippines. The South Pacific looks enchanting.

29 Jan 63 – at 9^th ASA Field Station, Clark AFB, PI

This base is like a little piece of America. It has everything. We live in a fairly new billet in three-man rooms. Outside walls, and inside walls as well, are louvered for ventilation. We have houseboys at $2.50 a month to make beds and shine shoes as well as clean rooms, the billet, and its grounds.

Jeff (r) & Fred Baumann outside barracks, Clark AFB, 1963

The pool is across the street, tennis courts are nearby, and the enlisted men’s open mess, called the Coconut Grove, is next door.

The pool across the street

You hear music everywhere on base. It’s from Armed Forces Radio (AFR), which we get on our transistors, and you can also hear it through speakers in the clubs and the rec areas.

It’s a strange combination of Country Western and Rock ‘n Roll, everything from ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ and ‘Oklahoma Hills’ to Little Richard’s ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’ and lots of Ray Charles.

♫ I’m an old road-hog/I drove a big truck

Shot the pinball machine, but it brought me bad luck†

The work is interesting, informative, and not too hard. I work the mid-shift from Midnight to 7:00 AM. The place where we work, called Operations (Ops for short), is a windowless, concrete building in a heavily-guarded, barbed wire enclosure in the middle of an enormous field.

When I wake up in the afternoon, I do errands, read in bed, or go to the pool. I generally go to Happy Hour at the Airmen’s Club from 4:30 to 5:30  afternoons. All drinks are only 10 cents, normally 20 cents, while weeds run 95 cents a carton. I either stay there for a while or go into town with a buddy.

The town called Angeles City is right outside the base. It’s like something out of Susie Wong’s world, just like those Far Eastern army towns you read about in war novels. All the joints have American names.

A GI joint, Angeles City, PI, 1963

It’s one huge collection of bars, whores, beds, Jeepney taxi drivers, horse and buggy conveyances, and the most poverty stricken people I’ve ever seen. The girls are mostly young.

Thus far when I think of this country, the R&R song ‘Babycakes’ (Ooooh, baby, oooh), the dance ‘Mashed Potatoes’, strong San Miguel beer, as well as comments in the bars like ‘Hey Joe, you buy me a ladies beer’ – come to mind as representative of the PI.

♫ Hey Mama, don’t you treat me wrong

Come and love your daddy all night long††

15 Feb 63

The Filipinos and the bar girls don’t need any information. The first night I went to town, all the girls asked me if I was ‘9^th ASA’. I’m trying to organize the girls into an entertainment union so they can get a guaranteed wage for hustling drinks.

Jeff (2d on l) & buddies, Angeles City, 1963

         

Manila, the capital, is 65 miles away. I just got back from there. It’s just like any large city in the States, a total imitation of the US with gangs, the PTA, an American Legion, and a Chamber of Commerce. English is the common language, and just about everyone speaks it. The University of the Philippines even has sororities.

I like it here, but I don’t know why.

24 Mar 63

I have a chance to get a hop to New Delhi next month, but I’m going to pass it up for a while. They have space available on planes to India once a week and to Saigon, Bangkok, Taiwan, and Japan every day. They also have a ship, which goes to Hong Kong 4 times a year, expressly for guys going on leave.

I might go out for football because they go on game trips to Japan, Korea, and Okinawa. This station has a good team. They almost beat the Far Eastern champions last year.

11 Apr 63

Some friends and I took a train to a place called Dagupan, a few hours from here. Just beyond the city is a beautiful white sandy beach on the South China Sea where we rented a hut for a couple of days, took in some sun and surf, and drank a lot of beer.

♫ Where the deep blue pearly waters

Wash upon white silver sands

We watched the sun set in the evening

In a far and distant land†††

I cut it too close getting back from town last night and almost missed the shuttle to Ops for mid-shift. If a guy’s had one too many in Angeles, the flood lighting around the Ops building for night security definitely has a sobering effect.

28 Apr 63

The PI is quite different from any other environment I have ever seen. This country is a cross between the 20^th and 19^th century. Even in Manila, a large (pop. 2 million), Westernized, and extremely dirty city, one will see horse-drawn carts on the streets with old WWII jeeps used as taxis and private vehicles.

Manila Bay

About 85% if the people are extremely poor, ill-fed, ill-clothed, and unhealthy. Begging for money or cigarettes is very common here.

A strong national police force secures the peace. In the expensive commercial sections of Manila, there’s a cop on duty every hundred yards. There are guards on all the trains. Most cops carry submachine guns or shotguns.

It’s starting to get very hot now with the rainy season approaching soon.

17 May 63

Some of us took a bus to Baguio, a mountain resort about 120 miles north of Clark AFB. It’s about 5000 feet up in the clouds and nice relief from the heat of the plains.

♫  I’m gonna climb that mountain

Walk up there among the clouds††††

         

On the way up – before the steep ascents – we passed many poor farmers and their water buffalo. The trip was one of the most beautiful as well as the most dangerous bus rides I’ll probably ever take.

Perilous Baguio road, 1963

         

In the Philippines, Jeff availed himself of the Army’s recruiting slogan ‘Fun, Travel, and Adventure’ or FTA,* but the bloom was beginning to fade. The weather in the South Pacific – rising temps and drenching monsoons – was a damper, but he was also finding the repetitive classified work less challenging, while the allure of an endless party life had begun to pall.

As will be apparent in the next post, it was war just over the horizon that would dramatically change Jeff’s experience in the military.

____________________________________________________________ 

*With the later rise of GI anti-Vietnam War protest in which Jeff was a principal player, the Army’s slogan FTA became ‘Fuck the Army’.

Links to music videos:

†       

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIbK9LWKO5g

††      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjSaHcBcI4I&index=3&list=RDfgfYSLNddGo

†††     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrErJRCovSw&list=RDGrErJRCovSw&index=1

††††

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0JsYKHTJlg

Death in Saigon, Camelot in Disarray

The story began on a steamy day in Foggy Bottom, late August, Washington, ’63, and played out with all the elements of a fictional spy thriller. Thanks to the passage of time and declassification, we can now eavesdrop on the highly secret daily moves within the US government (USG) that led to the coup in Saigon. A year earlier, JFK had installed a taping system, and recently the audio tapes and follow-on memoranda as well as a lengthy, detailed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) history of events have all been made public.

Foggy Bottom was a local name for the State Department complex along the Potomac River. Everyone of importance was out of town, Jack Kennedy (JFK) up on Cape Cod at the family compound, the Secretary of State at the United Nations (UN) in New York, the CIA chief at his California get-away, the Defense Secretary and others out of reach on that end-of-summer weekend.

Three senior diplomats remaining in the capital kept an eye on US-South Vietnam (SVN) policy. Recent news had not been good, and cables from Saigon indicated conditions in SVN were getting much worse. President Diem’s brother Nhu, the de facto secret police chief, had just sent squads of Special Forces and combat police into three major Buddhist pagodas, and over a thousand priests and nuns had been roughed up and arrested. Reportedly, several hundred were killed.

Since spring, the predominantly Catholic government of Diem had been in sharp conflict with the Buddhist religious establishment, which represented the predominantly Buddhist population. It had started on a minor note to which the regime had reacted violently, killing nine unarmed civilians. In reaction, saffron-robed Buddhist monks called bonzes had begun martyring themselves in public squares – gasoline and a match – creating shocking photos on the front pages of the world press and embarrassing the regime’s patron, the United States.

The US, present when SVN was established and Diem installed in the mid-‘50s, by then had much political capital invested. The escalating Buddhist crisis was distracting attention from the government’s flagging fight against Communist North Vietnam’s insurgency, and Washington became concerned. Things weren’t going well with the US client state anyway – endemic corruption and resistance to reforms to engender popular support had become the norm.

On July 4th 1963, the US Embassy in Saigon threw its annual Independence Day party. A number of senior South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) generals, including General Tran Van Don, ran into an ex-comrade in arms, Lou Conein. French by birth, American by citizenship, a long serving hand in the Saigon CIA Station. Conein had first arrived in Vietnam in ‘45 as a WWII OSS* operative, and had fought alongside some of officers now generals in driving the Japanese occupation forces out of Indochina. His old friends invited him to join them for drinks at the nightclub at the Hotel Caravelle where they revealed they were planning a coup against Diem, and asked Conein to find out what Washington’s attitude would be.

 

General Don, coup plotters’ contact with Conein for US Embassy

Conein reported back to them that the US was non-committal, but would not stand in the way – what the conspirators hoped to hear. Planning began, then on August 21st the raid on the pagodas occurred, and Nhu falsely implicated the generals. They were furious, it was the final straw.

The next day, they sent word to the American Embassy asking the USG for a signal. It was the very day the new ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, arrived. He’d been briefed earlier and was disposed toward regime change. He cabled State for instructions and ordered Conein to liaise with the cabal. In addition, a team of Army Security Agency (ASA) linguists (lingys), including brother Jeff Sharlet, were quickly flown into Saigon from Clark Air Base in the Philippines (PI). Set up at an out of the way base, their classified mission was to tap into the conspirators’ communications.† 

Lodge’s urgent cable reached Washington that humid Saturday morning, instantly setting in motion a flurry of activity. Since spring the President himself and most of his senior advisers had become disenchanted with Diem’s leadership, especially his brother’s actions. It had become clear that the war against the insurgents would not be won without a regime change.

The ambassador needed immediate guidance, so the key officer, Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East Hilsman, and his superior, the Deputy Secretary of State, began urgently drafting strong, unambiguous instructions for regime change in Saigon – at the very least, the removal of Nhu.

Protocol required that the communication be approved by the Under Secretary of State who was in town, but at the golf course. With the cable in hand, the draftsmen rushed out to Burning Tree Golf Course where they caught up with Secretary Ball at the ninth hole. Ball insisted on calling JFK at his Hyannisport retreat. The President suggested circulating the draft for more approvals.

By Saturday evening, Rusk had been reached at the UN, as well as the acting chiefs at the Pentagon and CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Shortly after 9 PM, JFK’s White House Vietnam adviser telephoned him at the Cape and secured final approval. At 9:36 PM, the cable that would irreversibly transform America’s commitment in Southeast Asia went off.

Marked ‘Top Secret’ and ‘Eyes Only – Ambassador Lodge’, the text was as direct as diplomatic language permitted. The ambassador was to see Diem forthwith to say that the USG could no longer tolerate Nhu, but if Lodge’s efforts were to no avail, then, in the delicate phrasing of high diplomacy, “we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.” The key generals were to be told that if Diem proved obdurate about his brother, then the USG is “prepared to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem” himself. The ambassador was assured that Washington would back him “to the hilt.” As history has recorded, a ‘green light’ had been given.

Ambassador Lodge and President Diem

On Monday, August 26th, with all the foreign policy principals back in town, there was alarm that the cable had been too strong, even incendiary. The President’s advisers were divided – McNamara at the Pentagon, McCone of CIA, and General Taylor of the Chiefs all felt that Hilsman, Harriman, and Ball had gone too far. Concerned over the divide among his inner circle, JFK quickly convened the National Security Council.

At that first of many meetings, the President served as moderator, generally questioning rather than expressing his views. However, at the outset when several inner circle people proposed withdrawing the cable, JFK rejected that course of action.

Despite the concern over the tone of the cable, Hilsman led off the initial session, expressing the broad consensus that Nhu had to go. He added that the two key generals who had sent word to Lodge told their US contacts “you have got to make up your mind.” From where the generals stood, things had reached a critical point, and the USG could no longer sit on the fence. JFK called another meeting for Tuesday and asked that Ambassador Nolting, the outgoing Saigon envoy be present. McNamara suggested designating the policy group an Executive Committee or ExComm.

As the ExComm went through a series of meetings that last week of August, no clear agreement on what to do about the situation in Saigon had been reached, and the President was beset by indecision.

On August 28th, domestic politics momentarily intruded on the ExComm deliberations. That was the day of the great march on Washington, 250,000 strong, culminating in Martin Luther King’s (MLK) iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech at the Lincoln Memorial.  JFK broke off a late afternoon session to receive MLK and a delegation from the historic event.

 

MLK (l) leading a delegation to meet with JFK (r), August 28, 1963

Although JFK was deeply skeptical about its likelihood of success, he decided at the next day’s ExComm on one more attempt to get Diem to oust Nhu. If it failed, the ambassador was to learn of the generals’ plans, but without committing the USG. Ruefully, JFK observed that America was “hip-deep in mud in Vietnam” and if he let the country go “down the drain,” Congress would be madder than hell.

JFK remained distressed that his closest advisers disagreed, not only in Washington, but at the Saigon embassy where Lodge was an enthusiastic coup proponent while the general commanding the military advisors, essentially a career staff officer an old cavalry officer with no knowledge of guerrilla warfare, was doubtful and the CIA station chief less than keen. However, as the leading authority on the secret history of the Vietnam War has concluded: “In effect the President rejected an immediate coup, but accepted that one would eventually take place.”**

By the end of that hectic week in August, JFK directed a cable be sent leaving the initial green light signal on the table, but expressing his second thoughts. No doubt divining Washington’s hesitation and ambivalence, the generals, who were risking their lives and feared possible betrayal either by one of their own or even the Embassy, abruptly suspended planning for a near-term coup. The diplomatic reason given – they didn’t feel ready.

The pressure was off at the embassy, but Jeff and the ASA team continued their covert assignment on a 24/7 basis, recording and translating the intercepted communications of the target generals, and no doubt highlighting key words that turned up. Their ‘product’, destined for the National Security Agency, was so politically sensitive that it was rigged to explode should the guards be stopped enroute to the airport for the flight to Washington by South Vietnamese police or military personnel.

Decades later Jeff’s buddy, the late Ed Smith††, told me that at the time they had no idea why they were listening in on US allies. Despite their top secret and cryptographic security clearances, the ‘big picture’ was well above their pay grade. Jeff and the intercept team did not have ‘Need to Know’, a concept I understood well from my own ASA experience in Cold War Europe where  the translator working next to me and I were not permitted to discuss our respective work – compartmentalization was the name of the game.

September arrived, and nothing had changed in Saigon. The bumbling Diem remained blissfully unaware of the real state of affairs in the country, having long encouraged overly optimistic reports. Even his brother Nhu privately referred to the regime as ‘mandarin’ and ‘feudal’. Washington’s dilemma was that while the war was unwinnable with Diem in power, they foresaw political instability and a lost cause in the long run without him.

Meanwhile, Saigon was awash in rumors; an observer commented that the “city seemed as taut as a piano wire.”***  The senior conspirator of the summer plotters, General Minh, known as ‘Big Minh’, asked the CIA contacts to keep the lines of communication open, so Conein, under orders from the ambassador, listened and reported through channels.

Lodge himself remained committed, but like JFK in Washington, he presided over a divided house. By all reliable accounts, things were not going well in South Vietnam, but his CIA chief, Jocko Richardson, tended to minimize the political crisis while his military adviser, General Harkins, written off by history as a “compelling mediocrity,”**** kept unrealistically insisting the war was going well. To reduce the dissonance, the ambassador engineered Richardson’s recall to Washington while JFK, anxious to gain more clarity, dispatched General Taylor and State’s Walt Rostow to Saigon on a fact-finding mission.



JFK,  Gen Taylor, and Sec McNamara conferring, September 24,1963

Then in early October, the USG learned the Saigon generals had resumed coup-planning. All indications were that they were in earnest. General Don, now liaison for the plotters, ran into Agent Conein and invited him to his office to learn the latest developments. Don passed on that Big Minh wanted to meet with Conein; they met for an hour, and Minh expressly asked Washington’s stance on a coup. He stressed that they were not seeking assistance, just assurance that the USG would recognize the post-coup government.

That promise came back quickly from JFK who directed the Embassy not to encourage a coup, but not to discourage one either. Essentially it was a repetition of the ambiguous signal of August, but satisfactory to the generals. They just wanted to be sure as they proceeded that the Americans would not betray them to Diem and Nhu.

 

Washington now became uneasy relying on Conein as its sole conduit to the conspirators. More a man of action than reflection, he wasn’t the ideal person to convey and negotiate USG positions. For the generals, however, there was no question of any other liaison – they knew Conein well and trusted him. So he remained Washington’s ‘man in the middle’. To throw off any possible surveillance by Nhu’s people, Conein and Don would meet seemingly by chance in nightclubs, at the airport, and even at the dentist they coincidentally shared, or use cut-outs, intermediaries, since both men were well-known around Saigon.

Conversely, from their side the generals wanted to be certain Conein was speaking with authority. An unobtrusive meeting was arranged at the airport between General Don and Ambassador Lodge as the ambassador awaited a flight. Don asked him in French for whom Conein spoke. Lodge replied unequivocally, “Il parle pour moi. Il me représente." (He speaks for me. He is my representative.)

Unexpectedly a ‘monkey wrench’ was thrown into the works when Harkins, a protégé of General Taylor, who opposed a coup, on his own initiative told General Don to cease and desist the plotting. Alarmed that the Americans had changed their collective position, the generals sought clarification. Conein told Don that the general had been out of line, and the ambassador, although an old Boston friend of Harkins, quickly set him straight. Meanwhile covering all bets back in Washington, the CIA director assured JFK that if the coup went awry, the Agency would disavow Conein as a rogue agent.

 

By mid-October, Jeff, Ed Smith, Fred Baumann, and their team finished their stint and headed back to the PI, but the surveillance mission continued with another group of lingys sent out from Clark Air Base. Meanwhile, Conein was instructed to ask Big Minh and the generals for their operational plans so the USG could evaluate the odds of success, but the plotters dithered and promised only to give the embassy 48-hour advance warning. Back in Washington, confidence in the outcome waxed and waned as the ExComm constantly reviewed the order of battle of rebel and loyalist forces.

The President, already quite uneasy, was getting mixed messages from his people. Ambassador Lodge came on strong while General Harkins via a backchannel was feeding Taylor dissent. Near the end of October, JFK signaled Lodge to slow things down, but the ambassador cabled back it was too late. The US was implicated, and at that point events in Saigon were beyond its influence.

 

On November 1st 1963, the conspirators’ promise of two days’ warning dissolved into four hours when they summoned Conein. Arranging for a Green Beret team to guard his family should the coup fail, Conein rushed off with a radio and his sidearm to coup headquarters from where he radioed the embassy a stream of reports for the next 18 hours.

 

The generals had planned well; loyalist forces were neutralized, but Diem and Nhu remained at large. Finally promised safe passage out of the country, the brothers surrendered, but soon after were assassinated by a special unit loyal to General Minh.

 

The unexpected news of the killings shocked official Washington. It was front page news around the world – I read about it in Izvestiia in Moscow†††. When the President received the news, he turned ashen, jumped up, and rushed out of the room. His close adviser, Arthur Schlesinger, later said he had never seen JFK so distraught since the Bay of Pigs fiasco in ’61.

 

Whatever his intentions for Vietnam might have been, JFK was too shrewd not to instantly grasp that the United States was complicit in the death of a head of state, and, absent a successor to ensure political stability, America would be stuck in Vietnam.

 

Camelot, the aura of style, grace, and, above all, effectiveness in the world at large, was in disarray. Then a mere three weeks later with the assassination of the young president, the Camelot on the Potomac passed into history as a brief moment of unbridled optimism, the romance of great power, and, yes, unchecked hubris.

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*The Office of Strategic Services or OSS was the United States’ clandestine military arm during WWII, and precursor of the CIA established in 1947.

**J Prados, Kennedy Considered Supporting Coup in South Vietnam, August 1963, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 302 (2009), 15. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB302/index.htm

***R Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters (2008), 200.

****D Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972), 183.

† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/conein-lawrence-of-vietnam.html

†† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/05/vietnam-coup-capers.html
 

††† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/10/surveilling-and-surveilled.html