Afghan Debacle : The Intel

August 18, 2021–The game of secrecy is so very odd. The CIA is still sitting on half-century old documents on its secret war against Castro–which law required be declassified no later than 2018–when Afghanistan collapses and people start talking about an intelligence failure bound up in the fall of Kabul. The next day there is a leak to the New York Times of CIA and other intelligence reports purporting to show that the spooks were increasingly doubtful of the stability of the U.S. ally. Time to pick apart that claim, and add a little to it.

First, what is the function of intelligence? To inform foreign and defense policy. Not to tell you today that your favorite ally will fall tomorrow. What is in the President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) is important of course, but it is supremely ephemeral. Tell you today so you can get your ambassador to London to say x and your representative in Kabul to offer a safe passage to Ashraf Ghani. The PDBs have nothing to do with intelligence that permits you to choose either to plan an orderly withdrawal or to ramp up your military intervention to the degree necessary to afford the Afghan state a new lease on life. The proper measure of merit is the longer-term analyses.

Now a bit of confusion sets in. Both the PDBs and the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) are the province of the Director of National Intelligence, America’s intelligence czar. Beyond that long-range reporting is mainly the product of the Central Intelligence Agency, in fact Gina Haspel’s CIA. Haspel, who came out of the operations side of the agency, even out of the depths of the black prisons program, took over the agency at Donald Trump’s behest, at a time when CIA’s largest field project was backing a militia movement in Afghanistan. Continuing that project required an ongoing Afghan war. The Times leak indicates that when Haspel left, replaced by William J. Burns, the intelligence prediction was that the Kabul government had at least 18 months left to it. So far as we know this was a CIA report, not from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), although even if it were the latter, the DNI would have been reliant upon CIA input.

The CIA had unique intel sources–the opposite side of the coin from the complaints heard now that it is going to lose its channels in Afghanistan. Militia members represent Afghan ethnic groups that were the foundation of the CIA secret war in Afghanistan against Russia–they were its “Afghantsy,” as the word was then. To take just one example, the Haqqani network, now held to be a secret ally of the Taliban, was then one of the CIA resistance groups. There had to be rumblings in the ground, to say nothing of CIA’s radio intelligence, phone monitors, or aerial photography, of the increasing unreliability of local allies. The same phenomenon had to be evident in the reporting from U.S. military channels, since the military were supporting the Afghan national security forces. The press, of course, was right out there reporting how national police or troop units melted away when fighting for villages, or even when merely tasked to hold local districts. CIA analysts had all that to ponder. They warned of Kabul’s weakening grip but, in deference to CIA’s operational interests, put no timeframe on the moment of maximum danger.

Gina Haspel made all the usual genuflections at her nomination hearings. She promised to get the CIA back to its traditional functions of esp[ionage and analysis, and out of the politically-charged places it had been. Afghanistan was the CIA’s make-or-break challenge on Haspel’s watch. She seems to have produced the same policy-tainted intel as ever. Donald Trump’s “acting” DNIs (they play ones on TV?) Joseph McGuire, Richard Grennell, and John Ratcliffe reserved their attention for impeachment matters and favorite sons. They had no time for Afghanistan. Professional analysts apparently punted, it is reported, and offered different forecasts depending upon the size of the U.S. deployment, with an optimum timeframe that hinged on a deployment larger than the Trump administration was then planning for. The NIE record on Afghanistan, when we see it, is going to be interesting. In 2019, the last year in which Dan Coats was the (not acting) DNI, overlapping with Haspel’s first as CIA director, the Afghan assessment was that neither the Taliban nor the Kabul government would be able to gain the upper hand.

Director Burns succeeded Haspel. He was confirmed in March 2021. In July, the Times leak tells us, the CIA view had changed to one of more immediate peril for Kabul. By then Afghan district seats were falling regularly to the Taliban and province capitals were increasingly exposed, soon to begin falling. Kabul’s general reserves, the commando units, were shuttling from place to place so quickly they were not only exhausted but were perfectly able to see the disintegration among the regulars and police. By July the CIA’s darkening views of the intelligence were too late to give the White House fair warning of impending events. And here we are.

Next Steps in Afghanistan

August 17, 2021– Now it’s time to get real. No more magical thinking that the “interpreter problem” will solve itself, that the Ashraf Ghani government is a stable, supple entity, or that the Afghan security forces will wake up and start fighting. Also, we have an armed Taliban army that controls the lands of our former ally. And we have an American expeditionary force, sent to Kabul to protect an evacuation, that could become entrapped among a sea of enemies. What to do?

First, believe it or not, we need to talk to the Taliban. Everyone who we want to save who’s not already located at Kabul international airport is in enemy-held territory. The women and children whose social environments have been upended, they are there too. The Taliban may go on a rampage, but they will grow tired of killing, and distressed at the international condemnation they will incur. This situation is ripe for an orderly departure program. The United States previously ran such a program with Cuba, and with Thailand we had such a program for the Hmong in Laos, and the Vietnam era of “boat people” ended with a quasi-program of this sort. The U.S. needs to waive immigration paperwork and issue laissez-passer permissions to Afghans who want to leave.They can process out through the airport. There’s been talk of some intermediate “holding area”-type destination–the U.S. used Guam for this purpose after the collapse of South Vietnam–but those kinds of considerations are exactly what leads to red tape and more/worse bureaucratic nightmares. Just get the thing done.

Our troops at the airport will also benefit from a better understanding of their relationship with their adversary. Orderly departure will take off the pressure and make it less likely that some outburst between Taliban and U.S. soldiers will erupt and turn into full-scale war. Don’t forget our forces are surrounded, not numerous, and at the end of a tenuous aerial supply line that has also to serve as the main avenue for evacuation of our Afghan friends. This could easily turn into a repeat of 1839 and the massacre of a residual British force trying to evacuate into India.

Done properly, orderly departure could function well enough that, under the best case, American troops could hand over to Taliban Afghans who would continue to facilitate the flow of refugees–who, by the way–would be people now able to carry critical documents and possessions with them. In the near term the U.S. security perimeter would be there to dissuade the Taliban from false moves. Apart from everything else, Orderly Departure would greatly reduce the probability of panic, which is among the most dangerous aspects of the current situation.

Done properly, an orderly departure program could manifest as an ingenious political move from the Biden administration. If talks fail, or if a program starts and then ruptures, Biden will also avoid charges he did nothing for our Afghan friends. There’s little to lose but plenty to be gained here. The rush to apportion blame for Afghanistan is stupid–the blame goes everywhere and the struggle to one-up the opponent distracts from the real crisis. Blame is really an extension of magical thinking.

Afghanistan Debacle

August 16, 2021– I will need to rework this piece later but it’s necessary to get something up right away. Some colleagues, including some who should know better, are trumpeting the failure of President Joseph Biden amid the ruins of the American war in Afghanistan. For some of them this is about nailing Biden for anything they can get him on, for others it is about guilt that America did not long ago start to do better for its local helpers and indigenous allies. The fall of Kabul, complete with helicopter scenes identical to the last days of Saigon in 1975, should be an object lesson for us all–but not in the way that these pundits try to put it.

Longtime readers of this space will know that now many years ago I posted on the reasons America had lost its Afghan war. And you didn’t need to read me to learn that–American presidents since Barack Obama have already conceded as much. This defeat didn’t happen on Joe Biden’s watch. Indeed, Donald J. Trump promised the very withdrawal Biden has been carrying out. The generals dissuaded Trump, and they tried to back Biden down also. The Taliban watched it all, while the military balance shifted such that they were gaining ground even with American forces still in-country. That’s when the war was finally lost, and it was during the Trump presidency.

Trump’s fierce disdain for immigration was also where the kibosh was put on the evacuation of the Afghans who had helped American soldiers in the war. The obstacles, red tape, deliberate slow walking of paperwork, and all the rest started then, not now. Joe Biden had nothing to do with it. In fact he was not even in government then.

Trump did something else too–agree a diplomatic arrangement that enthralled the Taliban while cutting out the U.S. Afghan allies. That had the purpose of assisting the U.S. withdrawal that Trump intended but never completed. The boost the Taliban got from that helped them in the final round of fighting. The demoralization of the Ghani government did nothing to enthuse the defense of the state that has just collapsed.

The time is past to take a much harder look at America’s military and intelligence services. They have been the ones saying, for years now, that we were winning the war, that stabilization had come and the Afghan military and security forces were up to the job, that the defense could hold, even, most recently, that Kabul had months or more than a year still ahead of it. The swan songs were garbage. The only question is whether the generals and spooks knew they were weaving a tapestry, and how soon. We have a overpriced, overbearing, overswearing, underperforming and misunderstanding national security apparatus that is willing to lie to get its way. That has to change, the sooner the better.

Pentagon Papers v. Government Secrecy–Still At It After All These Years

June 15, 2021— Sunday was the 50th anniversary of the moment–also a Sunday– when the New York Times began publishing the leaked “Pentagon Papers.” The papers were a top secret compilation of U.S. government records plus analyses by experienced observers of the roots and process of United States intervention in Vietnam. The papers had actually been commissioned by then-secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara, perplexed at the seeming intractability of the American situation in Vietnam.

As McNamara had hoped, the Pentagon Papers taught many things. The men who copied the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, and Ellsberg, who circulated them and finally made the leak a reality, hoped the secret record might bring a halt to the war. That did not happen. But for a very long time–decades–the Papers formed the foundation for much of the historical analysis of the Vietnam war. Today, when declassification, even at its snail’s pace, has advanced the record past what is available in the Pentagon Papers, that collection remains a major source for Vietnamese historians in reconstructing their wartime experience.

With a tip of the hat to Ellsberg and Russo, the historical issues are not my target today. Rather it is the secrecy. Government secrecy. This seems to be an obsession, and the leak of the Pentagon Papers marked a milestone in the evolution of the struggle over secrecy. Within hours of the appearance of the Times’s edition of June 13, 1971, officials at the White House were already considering counterattacks. The president, Richard Nixon, was actually relatively calm about the leak, figuring that the documents and analysis dated to the Johnson administration and thus were embarrassing only to his Democrat opponents, but staff adviser Alexander M. Haig was adamant that secrecy had to be upheld. The strong countermeasures turned into an attempt to impose prior restraint, to deny the press the opportunity to report this story to the people. Had the Nixon White House succeeded the U.S. government would have established a principle that it could censor the information available to the American public. But after initial success in district courts, Nixon officials failed at the Supreme Court, which denied the administration’s bid for prior restraint.

In the torrent of commentary accompanying the 50th anniversary, New York Times author Adam Liptak contributed a piece arguing that the Pentagon Papers decisions actually led to an “incoherent state of law” because they did not draw precise boundaries around what was and was not permissible for government. There is a certain amount of sense to that, but the bigger truth is authorities have contested the public’s right to know all along. The Pentagon Papers case tied down one flap of the tent, but there is plenty more blowing in the wind. In fact, today, as it happens, we are smack in the middle of the latest battle over government secrecy, where it turns out that officials of the last administration sought the private communications and contact information (and perhaps, more) of political opponents, journalists, and even the administration’s own White House counsel. There will be more to say about this scandal before it ends, but for now let me simply say that the motives were as black, and the methods every bit as outlandish as those of fifty years ago.

Beware the White Knight McMaster

February 23, 2017–Do you hear the swooning? The country is almost heaving sighs of relief over President Trump’s appointment of Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster to preside over the National Security Council (NSC) staff in place of the departed Michael T. Flynn. The oohs! and aaahs! are audible. Suddenly the perception is that Mr. Trump is enlisting an adult to run his inside-the-White House national security staff, so rationality will prevail. The gossip is also that the NSC structure Trump laid down in one of this early presidential directives will be revised (again) to bring back the director of national intelligence, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA chieftain. Before we go too far, though, I want to register a “Not so fast!”

Part of the continuing problem is structural. What President Trump did, long before appointing McMasters as national security adviser, is create competing centers of power at the White House. None of them is the NSC staff. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, obviously has The Donald’s ear any time he needs it. Strategist Stephen Bannon reflects the political base of Trump’s power, and he has an agenda. He will not be crossed, or dismissed, unless the president decides on radical surgery and holds on to the tiller come what may. Reince Priebus mirrors the Republican party hierarchy that Mr. Trump needs to govern. He has an agenda too. For all of them the national security adviser is a target, someone to enlist to further their goals. Some objectives of the assorted White House power centers may overlap but others do not–and no amount of overlapping is going to do away with the equally thorny competition among the potentates for who gets the credit for each thing they do.

From this point of view Mike Flynn actually had an advantage. As an ideologue on his own account, one whose opinions were close to Trump’s, Flynn almost had the jets to stand up to the policy predators. General McMaster lacks such preordained positions. He might have strong prescriptions for strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, but across the Trump administration policy spectrum McMaster has an empty file cabinet waiting to be filled. Expect to see more, rather than less, engagement from the predators.

Much of the relief bandied about with General McMaster’s appointment centers on the historical conclusions he drew in a Vietnam history published in 1997, Dereliction of Duty. Many see McMaster as finding the military leaders at the time of Vietnam as wanting–failing in their duty to tell truth to power and kowtowing to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s (LBJ) agenda by keeping their silence and not telling him his strategy was flawed. That construction is mistaken. General McMaster actually delivered a much more conventional interpretation in which LBJ, the military’s civilian leaders, and the White House staff shared responsibility. The secretary of defense at the time, Robert McNamara, in this version of history, moved from distrusting the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to misleading them, and McNamara plus LBJ created the illusion that decisions to attack North Vietnam were alternatives to war rather than war itself. According to this logic the course led to planning for failure, and then a war without direction.

I critiqued McMaster’s analysis in 2009 in my book Unwinnable War  where I noted a number of things off with that construction. For one, LBJ’s views on Vietnam were opaque, and varied from day to day. McMaster cited only the telephone conversations where Johnson wanted no war, not those where LBJ spoke of “touching up” Hanoi. It is true that Robert McNamara rode herd on the JCS, but the charge the military were derelict is thin. Quite the opposite is true: every time they were asked for an opinion the Chiefs recited a litany that included cross-border operations into Laos, bombing, mining, and ground troops in great numbers. That litany would be recited as early as the Tonkin Gulf incident of August 1964, and over time they added more elements. In 1967, when Congress held hearings on the bombing, the military openly and publicly denounced McNamara’s approach. As for the directionless war, there is no evidence the Joint Chiefs had any more innovative a military strategy in mind than did the president.

Meanwhile, senior military leaders were well aware of the political impact of their public views. Then–as now–the military were guarded and diffident about what they said. H. R. McMaster should have been well attuned to that aspect, which, at the time he was writing, had most recently been demonstrated in the Gulf War of 1990-1991, when Joint Chiefs chairman Colin L. Powell had kept silent his differences with then-defense secretary Dick Cheney. What goes around comes around–in the prelude to the Iraq invasion of 2003, Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki did openly express a different view from his political superiors–and he was promptly let go. The diffident silence which McMaster found so objectionable when looking back at Vietnam is the norm, not the exception.

In the Trump administration today the military has a different planetary configuration. It is not only General McMaster as security adviser, but also General James Mattis as secretary of defense, and General John F. Kelly as secretary for homeland security. Other military men occupy numerous positions on the NSC staff, including McMaster’s current deputy. Some of the public’s relief at the McMaster appointment actually stems from the thought these officers will be the “adults” who rein in the outlandish proposals of the president and his henchmen, but that is unlikely for two reasons: the norm of deferring to the political leadership (reinforced in McMaster’s case, by the way, because he remains on active duty, and therefore subject to regulations about what can be said about [and to] a chief executive); and the limited knowledge and experience of these military men outside their chosen profession. Meanwhile McMaster will be under intense pressure to conform to the views of the various White House power centers.

The McMaster appointment does not get citizens out of the woods. President Trump’s activities will continue to provoke and  distress. A more likely role for the military men in this presidency–as General Mattis has already shown–is to sooth nerves shaken up by the president. We’ll see.

Dien Bien Phu: “The Fruit are Ripe”

May 8, 2014–French shortwave radio in Tonkin broadcast the phrase “The Fruit are Ripe” at 1:05 PM of May 8, 1954 (1:05 AM on the American east coast). The message was an “open code,” of the same sort the British had sent over the BBC in World War II to alert various Resistance networks on the continent. The French military commander in Tonkin, Major General Rene Cogny, had agreed to send this message when he was certain of the fall of the entrenched camp at Dien Bien Phu. French army units in Laos had been warned, in messages dropped to them by scout planes, to listen for the open code message.

The Tonkin radio was actually late–the French at Dien Bien Phu had stopped shooting around 5:30 in the afternoon of the 7th. Like much else about this decisive battle, the reasons for the discrepancy remain obscure. Perhaps Cogny was reluctant to acknowledge final defeat. Or again, there had been a last-minute plan for a sally of the fittest remaining French troops and maybe the Tonkin command, hoping that action had taken place, was trying to make time for the desperate sortie.

“The Fruit are Ripe” began a sort of delicate dance with many movements. One was among the French units in Laos, alerted to be on the watch for from Dien Bien Phu. Seventy-eight men made it to join either the Franco-Laotian regulars and commandos, or the Hmong partisans strung in an arc along the Laotian side of the border. Remarkably, one survivor had also walked out of another French entrenched camp, Na San, when that had been abandoned in the summer of 1953.

Another dance movement was the Viet Minh pursuit. General Giap wanted to regroup his main forces closer to Hanoi for a final offensive–but he also wished to follow up into Laos. He ordered Viet Minh who had not been at the battle–and some who were–into northern Laos. That meant a race between the French perched in their arc and the Viet Minh pursuers.

It was an irony of Dien Bien Phu that the worst French wounded became the luckiest survivors. With but a handful of doctors and medical personnel, and almost no drugs, the Viet Minh were in no position to treat French wounded. Meanwhile French medical staff, led by the redoubtable Doctor Paul Grauwin, shared their drug supplies with the Viets and helped their wounded. Together with the Viet Minh’s chief surgeon, General Giap decided to make a deal. In exchange for French medicines and medical assistance, they would re-open the airfield at Dien Bien Phu. The French air force could fly in medical supplies and evacuate the wounded. Some 858 seriously wounded soldiers left the entrenched camp that way.

In yet another United States connection to Dien Bien Phu, many of those French wounded would immediately be evacuated to France by the U.S. Air Force. It happened this way: There had been a secret U.S. airlift of paratroops and French Navy pilots called Project “Blue Star”–you can read all about it in Operation Vulture. Blue Star had used huge C-124 transport planes–the C-5As of that day–to deliver the French troops to what is now Da Nang. The Blue Star planes were still there when the smaller French Dakotas began to lift out the wounded from Dien Bien Phu. President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved a French appeal to carry the wounded home aboard the big American planes.

Thus ended the epic siege in the Vietnamese uplands.

Deepening Shadows at Dien Bien Phu

April 24, 2014–Today is the sixtieth anniversary of what is possibly the most controversial episode of the siege of Dien Bien Phu. That 1954 battle, which brought an end to the French colony of Indochina, had already been sputtering on for more than a month. The French had lost key positions and many soldiers. Some of the men were replaced by parachuted reinforcements but the lost strongpoints were gone–and with them much of the area within which the French air force needed to drop in paratroopers and supplies. Only yesterday in that history, April 23, 1954, one more disastrous counterattack showed just how dire the situation had become.

The episode concerned a strongpoint known as Huguette-1, which the Viet Minh army of General Vo Nguyen Giap had first pinched off, then basically starved out. Against the advice of his senior officers the French commander, Colonel Christian de Castries, decided to use his last constituted reserve in an attempt to regain Huguette-1. That unit, the 2nd Foreign Legion Parachute Battalion, was in relatively good shape because it had arrived only recently, though in just two weeks at Dien Bien Phu the unit had lost nearly half its strength. The H-1 counterattack would be the first time the battalion had fought together in the battle. Major Hubert Liesenfeldt found his units late to reach their attack positions, making the preparatory air strike premature. An artillery bombardment was truncated due to the confusion. Then the redoubtable Lieutenant Colonel Marcel Bigeard, coordinator of all counterattacks at the entrenched camp, discovered Liesenfeldt out of touch with some of his embattled assault companies because his radios were tuned to the wrong frequency. The venture collapsed.

All that is subtext to the controversy of April 24. By that day the American secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was in Paris and closeted with top French officials, who were in shock at the crisis of Dien Bien Phu. We have seen Dulles, just the other day in this space (“Dawn of the Vietnam Conflict,” April 19, 2014), trying to stiffen President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s resolve to intervene in this desperate French battle. Now, in company with French foreign minister Georges Bidault, Secretary Dulles supposedly asked, as they descended the stairs in between formal working sessions, “And if I gave you two atomic bombs for Dien Bien Phu?”

Needless to say the question of using nuclear weapons in this Vietnam battle has been disputed ever since. I don’t want to write too much at this sitting because I’d like to come back later today and post something about Putin and the Ukraine, but I’ll say here that the most thorough analysis you’ll find anywhere on the question of nuclear weapons and Dien Bien Phu is in my book Operation Vulture. Take a look at it.

Dawn of the Vietnam Conflict: War Powers and Dien Bien Phu

April 19, 2014–President Dwight D. Eisenhower was not an expert golfer but he was a dedicated one. Eisenhower had an area at the White House to practice his putt, regularly took time off to golf at the Burning Tree course, and he even took golfing vacations. Sixty years ago today, at the height of the Dien Bien Phu crisis, Ike was on one of those trips. He’d gone to Georgia, to the National Golf Club in Augusta, site of the PGA tournament. The president’s cottage at Augusta was called the “Little White House.” There Ike would experience one of the key moments of the Vietnam crisis.

President Eisenhower could hardly escape the action. A couple of days earlier his vice-president, Richard M. Nixon, had told an audience of media moguls that U.S. troops might well have to go fight in Vietnam. Ike wanted to help France, whose army was trapped at Dien Bien Phu, with its best units steadily losing strength. The situation was so dismal that men considered it good news when the New York Times could headline, “INCREASED RAINS SEEN SLOWING THE FIGHTING.” Nixon’s remarks were being interpreted as a trial balloon for U.S. intervention. Press inquiries flooded the Little White House. Soon after breakfast on April 19, 1954, Eisenhower telephoned Nixon, who worried the president would be furious at him for letting the cat out of the bag–officials had been trying to avoid mentioning that U.S. troops figured in the plans. But Ike was relaxed and told Mr. Nixon not to worry.

Eisenhower’s schemes to intervene at Dien Bien Phu might indeed involve American soldiers. At a minimum they included sailors and airmen. For nearly a month Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had been trying to create the conditions necessary for that intervention to go ahead. So far they had failed–British allies were opposed to a Vietnam intervention, while the French, despite their desperation, were leery of permitting the United States to have a big role in their war.

But Secretary Dulles had a formula to evade all obstacles. The Justice Department had worked up an extensive paper on presidential war powers as part of a government-wide study of Indochina intervention. Foster took that paper with him to visit the president on April 19. The two men would lunch at Augusta and mull over the Dien Bien Phu crisis.

The paper–like George W. Bush era Justice Department legal opinions on torture–was one of those documents that cobbled together lawyer language suitable to permit officials to do whatever they wanted. In this case the Justice paper relied on the “commander-in-chief clause” in Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution to assert that the president could order U.S. troops into battle without a congressional declaration of war. At their lunch Secretary Dulles scoffed at the paper’s legalisms but took its argument–the heart of the matter, Foster told Ike, was that the U.S. government “must have the power of self-preservation . . . . If the danger was great and imminent and Congress unable to act quickly enough to avert the danger, the president would have to act alone.” Why anything about a crisis threatening a French army in Vietnam was a matter of self-preservation to the United States Dulles did not attempt to explain. He was a preacher-man and capable of sallies like this.

On April 19, 1954, it was Dwight D. Eisenhower who saved the nation from war. For months Ike had been telling Congress he would not go into Indochina without getting its approval. Not only did Eisenhower feel bound by those political promises, he had just survived a congressional test of his foreign policy powers by a handful of votes–and would have lost if the Democratic Party, his opponents, had not rallied to his side. On April 19 Ike patted John Foster Dulles’s hand and told the secretary of state that as president he needed to carry out “the will of the people.” If not, the president warned, he could be impeached. As far as U.S. intervention to save Dien Bien Phu was concerned, the two men were still in the position of having to build a public consensus for war in Vietnam.

So passed another moment when the international crisis surrounding Dien Bien Phu could have pulled the United States into active fighting in Indochina a whole decade before this actually occurred. But Eisenhower and Dulles were not stymied by these developments. A few days later President Eisenhower made a political trip, swinging through New York and Kentucky in an effort to drum up support for intervention. There is much more to the story of America’s Dien Bien Phu. Read all about it in Operation Vulture.

Boss Spook from The Nam

April 8, 2014–Tom Polgar is not a household name. He’s probably not as well known as his daughter Susan, an international Chess grandmaster whose involvement a few years back in maneuverings among the pooh bahs of the United States Chess Federation became somewhat controversial. But the father’s role was far more consequential. Polgar, a senior official of the CIA, passed away two weeks ago. To the extent people remember him at all, it will be because of Frank Snepp, a subordinate when Polgar served as the agency’s last station chief in Saigon, whose searing account of the collapse of South Vietnam and the U.S. withdrawal, Decent Interval, was not very kind to Mr. Polgar.

Born in southern Hungary, Tom Polgar’s family moved to the U.S. when he was sixteen. As Hungarian Jews they fled the anti-Semitism taking root there as well as in Germany. There were claims later that he had helped others fell as well. Polgar always retained his Hungarian accent. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942, his languages (German, Spanish, Greek and some French) made him exceptional and Polgar was recruited into the OSS. Dropped behind German lines near the end of World War II, Polgar made his way to Berlin and ended up working in Germany for the OSS and its successors right through CIA, spending nearly a decade on this frontline of the Cold War. After that it was Vienna, another Cold War cockpit. Polgar’s detractors–Frank Snepp was never the only one–dubbed him “Rasputin.”

In the mid-60s he went into CIA’s Latin America Division, first at headquarters and then as station chief in Argentina. It was from there, in 1972, that Polgar was sent to Vietnam. He had no experience in Southeast Asia–but he was fluent in Hungarian and Hungary was among the member nations of the international commission that was supposed to supervise implementation of the Paris accords under which a ceasefire was instituted and the U.S. withdrew from South Vietnam. Polgar kept up his liaison with the Hungarians, and there are conflicting accounts of its impact once Saigon stood on the point of collapse in early 1975. Some maintain that myopic Hungarian optimism induced Polgar to delay the withdrawal of CIA agents and destruction of its files at Saigon station. Others argue Polgar was too close to Henry Kissinger at the White House. In any case the collapse of South Vietnam was a disaster for the agency.

Tom Polgar next went to Mexico City as station chief there, and eventually returned to CIA headquarters where he led the human resources office. He retired in 1981. When the Iran-Contra Affair began with the shootdown of a plane transporting supplies to Nicaraguan contra rebels on behalf of “private benefactors” working for the Reagan National Security Council (NSC), Tom Polgar came out of the shadows to comment in the Miami Herald, saying “I think the CIA is telling the truth that it was not involved in the flight.” Of course William J. Casey, the CIA director of that time, was involved–up to his ears–in what became the next great agency embarrassment, with some elements working directly to the Casey-NSC network, and others kept in the dark. Senator Warren Rudman of the joint committee of Congress that investigated Iran-Contra, believing they needed an insider to understand the agency, hired Tom Polgar as an investigator. Polgar was deeply troubled by the agency’s work in that affair, Rudman believed, and his work led directly to the discovery of irregularities and of a critical missing CIA cable.

The jury remains out on Tom Polgar’s exploits, but perhaps now we will hear more about them.

April Fools at Dien Bien Phu

April 1, 2014–Sixty years on one can look back at the Dien Bien Phu crisis and see that that April Fools’ Day was destined to become one of the most significant of the entire siege. April 1, 1954 became the day that many strands of the events came together. It was a day when the French decline accelerated and its chances in the struggle darkened perceptibly.

Let’s start with the battlefield. In the high mountain valley that is Dien Bien Phu, General Vo Nguyen Giap had launched what the Viet Minh would call the second stage of their offensive. This was where the Viets, who had already captured the outlying French positions, attacked the central strongpoints right in the valley. Giap hurled his battalions at the low hills which shielded the interior of the French entrenched camp, part of strongpoints “Dominique” and “Eliane.” The fight for Eliane-2 was particularly fierce. This phase of the siege has come to be known as the “Battle of the Five Hills.” The Viet Minh captured several important positions including, for a time, the peak of Eliane-2 itself. Just the previous day desperate counterattacks had ejected the Viet Minh from the center of that position and pinned them down at its edge. The redoubtable Major Marcel Bigeard was in the thick of it. Battle raged at Dien Bien Phu and the fight for the hills would go on for days longer, but on April Fools’ Day the combat was at its fiercest.

The parachute supply drops upon which the French camp relied were being curtailed by monsoon rain, worse every day. The French command calculated on April Fools’ Day that deliveries had reached a “catastrophic” level–averaging only 60 tons over the past four days, only a fraction of the amount necessary for a robust defense.

The French Expeditionary Corps, led by General Henri Navarre, conducted the campaign through its theater command for Tonkin–northern Vietnam–under General Rene Cogny and located at Hanoi. As the siege intensified Navarre and Cogny became increasingly adversarial, each blaming the other for the predicament they were in. The Expeditionary Corps had a forward command post at Hanoi, where Navarre had arrived the previous day, only for Cogny to refuse to meet him. The commander-in-chief summoned Cogny later and the two had a furious shouting match at headquarters. On April Fools’ Day General Cogny received a letter Navarre had written before leaving Saigon. The C-in-C could easily have brought the directive with him, but chose to send it by routine courier instead. The explosion between the two generals soured their relations, which never recovered, to the detriment of desperate French soldiers at the entrenched camp.

France had sent the chief of its armed services staff, General Paul Ely, on a mission to Washington to appeal for more help for Dien Bien Phu. While Ely was in Washington his American counterpart, Admiral Arthur Radford had suggested that a U.S. air strike by B-29 heavy bombers, soon to be dubbed Operation Vulture, could break up Giap’s siege force and destroy his supplies. Ely needed to consult with Navarre about an outside intervention of such proportions. He sent aide Colonel Raymond Brohon to speak to Navarre personally. On April Fools’ Day Brohon arrived at Saigon only to discover Navarre was not there. The consultations were delayed while Brohon traveled onwards to Hanoi.

Back in Washington, Admiral Radford had made his offer without any of the other chiefs of the U.S. armed services knowing of it. Redford summoned them, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to a meeting to present his proposal. That, too, had taken place the previous day. Some of the Chiefs opposed him. Their negative views, expressed in writing, began to land on his desk on April Fools’ Day too.

The admiral had not acted in isolation. In fact the Operation Vulture project was backed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his secretary of state John Foster Dulles. A couple of days before Mr. Dulles had given a speech at the Overseas Press Club linking Indochina with an American threat of “massive retaliation.” At lunch on April Fools’ Day President Eisenhower entertained some top correspondents and told them he might soon have to make a decision to send planes from American aircraft carriers off the Indochina coast to bomb the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. Soon afterwards Secretary Dulles phoned the president to report he was setting up a meeting with the congressional Gang of Eight to inform them of the Operation Vulture project. Meanwhile the Navy’s top officer, Admiral Robert B. Carney, cancelled a long-planned visit to his forces scattered across the Pacific–and he ordered the fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin to extend its cruise there.

Dulles and Radford were going to meet with the congressional leaders, who were certainly going to have questions. Among their principal concerns would be what allies the United States would  have for its intervention in Indochina. Washington’s most important ally in this regard was Great Britain. A few hours before his Overseas Press Club speech, Dulles and Eisenhower had met with the British ambassador to ask for London’s support. On April Fools’ Day the British foreign minister replied that “we fell it would be unrealistic not to face the possibility that the conditions for a favorable solution in Indochina may no longer exist.” Thus London, too, had been involved in this April Fools’ circus.

Dien Bien Phu would fight on for weeks longer. And the proponents of a U.S. intervention would play more cards before the game was up. Read the whole story in Operation Vulture.