Journal of the American Intelligence Professional

CIA and the Wars in

Southeast Asia

1947–75

A Studies in Intelligence Anthology

August 2016
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Graphic design and interactive features by Gabriella C.; cartography by T. K., both of 

the CIA Directorate of Analysis Multimedia Production Group.

Prepared in Support of 

Commemoration of the

Vietnam War’s 50th Anniversary

Cover photo: An Air America H-34 helicopter on a supply mission in Laos. CIA file photo.
CIA and the

Wars in Southeast Asia

1947–75

Selections, introduction, and summaries

by Clayton D. Laurie, CIA Historian,

and Andres Vaart, Managing Editor

August 2016

CENTER for the STUDY of INTELLIGENCE
Mission The mission of Studies in Intelligence is to stimulate within the 

Intelligence Community the constructive discussion of important 

issues of the day, to expand knowledge of lessons learned from 

past experiences, to increase understanding of the history of the 

profession, and to provide readers with considered reviews of 

public media concerning intelligence.

The journal is administered by the Center for the Study of 

Intelligence, which includes the CIA’s History Staff, CIA’s Lessons 

Learned Program, and the CIA Museum. In addition, it houses the 

Emerging Trends Program, which seeks to identify the impact of 

future trends on the work of US intelligence.

Contributions Studies in Intelligence welcomes articles, book reviews, and other 

communications. Hardcopy material or data discs (preferably in 

.doc or .rtf formats) may be mailed to:

Editor

Studies in Intelligence

Center for the Study of Intelligence

Central Intelligence Agency

Washington, DC 20505

Awards The Sherman Kent Award of $3,500 is offered annually for the 

most significant contribution to the literature of intelligence 

submitted for publication in Studies. The prize may be divided 

if two or more articles are judged to be of equal merit, or it may 

be withheld if no article is deemed sufficiently outstanding. An 

additional amount is available for other prizes.

Another monetary award is given in the name of Walter L. 

Pforzheimer to the graduate or undergraduate student who has 

written the best article on an intelligence-related subject.

Unless otherwise announced from year to year, articles on any 

subject within the range of Studies’ purview, as defined in its 

masthead, will be considered for the awards. They will be judged 

primarily on substantive originality and soundness, secondarily 

on literary qualities. Members of the Studies Editorial Board are 

excluded from the competition.

The Editorial Board welcomes readers’ nominations for awards.
I CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Dedication

This volume is dedicated to the men and women of the United States, Allied nations, 

and peoples of the region with whom US intelligence worked to thwart the advance of 

communism in Southeast Asia. Among the more than fifty-eight thousand Americans 

who gave their lives were eighteen members of the Central Intelligence Agency, their 

sacrifices marked by stars carved into CIA’s Memorial Wall.

CIA Memorial Wall.

III CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

The Purpose V

Foreword VII

Preface XI

Part I: Historical Overviews

Indochina – In Support of a Colonial Power, 1945–54 1

The Republic of Vietnam, Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954–65 5

The War “Goes Big,” 1965–75 13

As the Big War Rages, CIA Works at the Insurgency/Hamlet Level 17

Meanwhile, CIA in Laos, 1954–74 23

Postwar Reflections 27

Part II: Annotated Selections

Indochina – In Support of a Colonial Power, 1945–54 29

The Republic of Vietnam, Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954–65 30

The War “Goes Big,” 1965–75 33

As the Big War Rages, CIA Works at the Insurgency/Hamlet Level 35

Meanwhile, CIA in Laos, 1954–74 38

Postwar Reflections 40

Part III: Consolidated List of Cited Readings and Other References 43

Contents

V CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

The Purpose

This anthology was prepared as a contribution to Department of Defense–led 

interagency efforts to commemorate the passing of 50 years since the large-scale 

engagement of the military forces of the United States and other countries in 

defending the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) against communist guerrilla, 

mainforce, and North Vietnamese Army units. For CIA, and many members of the 

US military, engagement in South Vietnam began well before what is marked as the 

beginning of the 50th anniversary commemoration, 1965. As the 41 articles selected 

by CIA historian Clayton Laurie for this anthology will show, Southeast Asia was the 

focus of CIA activity as long ago as the early 1950s, when it was directed to provide 

support to French efforts to maintain control of its colony of Indochina.

VII CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Foreword

In his essay of introduction to the first-ever issue of Studies in Intelligence in 1955, 

“The Need for an Intelligence Literature,” the founder of the nation’s first journal on 

intelligence, Sherman Kent, wrote that the profession of intelligence had reached a 

high level of maturity and professionalism, but it lacked an essential ingredient of 

a true profession—a literature of its own. This was a “matter of great importance,” 

he went on, and then explained why: “As long as this discipline lacks a literature, its 

method, its vocabulary, its body of doctrine, and even its fundamental theory run the 

risk of never reaching maturity.” In the essay, he described the literature he thought 

was needed:

What I am talking about is a literature dedicated to the analysis of our 

many-sided calling, and produced by its most knowledgeable devotees . . . 

You might call it the institutional mind and memory of our discipline . . .

The most important service that such a literature performs is the permanent 

recording of our new ideas and experiences. When we record, we not only 

make possible easier and wider communication of thought, we also take a 

rudimentary step towards making our findings cumulative. 

It is in this spirit that Studies in Intelligence offers this anthology of articles 

published on the conflict in Southeast Asia. This collection is also offered as a CIA 

contribution to the Defense Department–led effort to commemorate the passing of 

50 years since the United States carried out its military commitment to the defense 

of the government of the Republic of Vietnam beginning in 1965 and ending in 1975. 

The 10-year-long commemoration is intended to provide opportunities to honor and 

thank the men and women engaged in the US defense of South Vietnam, both in 

military and nonmilitary functions. 

For many—myself among them—who served in uniform in Vietnam and who walked 

the edges of rice paddies awaiting the next ambush or boobytrap, disembarked 

from helicopters under fire, clawed up mountainsides in the gunsights of Viet Cong 

or North Vietnamese troops, or manned outposts under constant artillery fire, 

intelligence was a mystery, little more than the occasional source of warnings that 

usually led to a sudden helicopter flight to some unexplored place or to an order to 

dig deeper holes and sharpen our vigilance. On occasion, when a prisoner was taken 

or some official-looking papers were found, orders were given to send them “back 

to intelligence,” wherever that was. For the foot soldier, that was usually the end of 

it. But, of course, there was so much more to it than that—as I have come to learn 

in more than 40 years in the intelligence profession. And how different are today’s 

intelligence-driven conflicts in which soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines know so 

much more about the intelligence that drives their operations? 
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia VIII

We hope the articles in this collection will, for veterans of the conflict, lessen the 

mystery of national intelligence and serve to show them and students of the war the 

ways in which CIA at home attempted to honestly provide sound intelligence analysis 

to decisionmakers while, at the same time on Southeast Asian soil, it carried out 

operations aimed at contributing to the US military war effort. 

The Center for the Study of Intelligence and the Editorial Board of Studies in 

Intelligence also hope this collection will serve as acknowledgment and tribute to the 

many people of the US intelligence and diplomatic communities and US and Allied 

armed forces who worked mightily and faithfully, too often sacrificing life and limb, in 

the pursuit of US goals in Southeast Asia.

Andres Vaart

Managing Editor

Studies in Intelligence

August 2016

Late in 1967, shortly before I resigned as the special assistant for Vietnam to Dr. R. 

J. Smith, CIA’s deputy director for intelligence (DDI), I went to DCI Richard Helms to 

protest the publication over his signature of a national intelligence estimate in which 

the Defense Department’s intelligence analysts had cut by half CIA’s estimate of the 

size of the forces facing our troops in Vietnam. Mr. Helms’s response was “Dick, the 

war is the Pentagon’s show, and it’s not our job to challenge their running of it.” 

Smith was DDI during much of the Vietnam War. Early in my tenure as his special 

assistant for Vietnam, he declared that the conflict was an “intelligence sideshow.” 

The main enemy, the existential threat to America and the whole Western world, 

he reminded me, was our Cold War against the nuclear-armed Soviet Union, its 

occupation of Eastern Europe, and its avowed aim to subvert and supplant the world’s 

established and budding democracies, and that was where our intelligence efforts 

had to be focused. 

This anthology of Studies in Intelligence articles relating to the Vietnam conflict 

both reflects and challenges the perceptions held by Helms and Smith and, by his 

own admission, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Over a period of years a 

relatively small number of DI analysts produced an impressive body of cogent, mostly 

pessimistic analyses of the military, economic, political, and psychological situation 

in Vietnam and the prospects for US success in thwarting what was perceived 

by American political leaders as the Communist Bloc’s goal of overwhelming all 

of Southeast Asia. These products were exemplified in the so-called Pentagon 

Papers—which was largely a compilation of highly classified CIA intelligence analyses 

Foreword
IX CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

commissioned by McNamara and supervised by Smith—and in such Studies in 

Intelligence features as the dueling reviews of a book on the beginnings of America’s 

involvement with Vietnam.

Similarly, a substantial, but still a small number of CIA operations and logistics 

officers relative to the size of their parent Directorates of Operations and 

Administration, devised and executed rural counterinsurgency programs that for 

a time and in limited areas beat back communist political-military infiltration of 

southern Indochina. In the peak years of the conflict, CIA’s Saigon Station was 

the Agency’s largest, fielding specialists from all four directorates who directly 

supported and often spearheaded embassy and Military Assistance Command, 

Vietnam (MACV) programs.

The 42 Studies articles in this collection touch on all of the above themes, both as 

they were considered during the conflict and on reflection years after the 1973 Paris 

Peace Accords essentially ended US involvement in the Vietnamese civil war. Among 

the articles that addressed topics as the conflict unfolded are the earliest four works 

in this anthology. Originally classified and appearing during 1962–65, they addressed 

from different points of view the intelligence aspects of the counterinsurgency 

strategy the John F. Kennedy administration had adopted for use in Southeast 

Asia. Each was written by a seasoned intelligence practitioner, and each reflected 

considerations that remain valid 50 years later. Other contemporaneous articles 

addressed more specific intelligence techniques in the war’s context, including 

imagery analysis, battle damage assessment, targeting, assessment of HUMINT 

targets, and the estimative process that itself shaped US engagement in the region. 

The January 1973 signing of the Paris Peace Accords led to US military 

disengagement, but it ushered in a period of remembrance and reflection that 

continues to this day. The readers of this anthology will see clearly that, “sideshow” 

or not, for CIA and US intelligence at large, the conduct of intelligence during the 

conflicts in Southeast Asia served as archetypal models of the complex contours of 

intelligence in the times of war that would regrettably follow.

Richard Kovar

Former Special Assistant for Vietnam to the DDI 

and former Managing Editor of Studies in Intelligence 

August 2016

Foreword
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia X

The conflicts in Southeast Asia during the period 1945–75 in some respects marked 

the conclusion of Asian nationalist efforts to recover sovereignty over their lands, 

which had been conquered and governed or dominated by foreign powers since 

the 19th century. This turn-of-the-century (1900) Chinese-produced map depicts 

the common, unkind characterizations many Asians held of the occupying powers, 

including the French, who governed Indochina. The caption around the map reads as 

follows: top—”map of the current situation”; left—“understand at a glance”; right: 

“no words need be spoken.” Source: Wikicommons Maps. 
XI CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Preface

The Contents

The works in this anthology are essentially arranged chronologically through the 

several phases of CIA engagement in the region. The first part of this anthology 

contains brief historical surveys written by Dr. Laurie of each of the phases to provide 

context for the selections identified after each section. The titles in these sections 

are hyperlinked to summaries of their contents, which are contained in the second 

part of the anthology. These, in turn, are hyperlinked to the locations of digital 

versions of the articles on the Internet.

The collection begins with the first decade after WWII and the end of the French 

colonial occupation of Indochina. This is followed by four sections covering US 

intelligence analysis and engagement from 1954 to the evacuation of 1975. The 

anthology closes with a section of essays that represent postwar reflections on the 

Southeast Asian experience.

Other Resources

Studies in Intelligence is housed in CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, 

which is also home to CIA’s staff and contract historians. Throughout this 

anthology readers will find allusions to unclassified or declassified histories on the 

subjects of this anthology. Among these is the collection of histories written by 

Thomas L. Ahern, Jr. In addition, providing rich reference material is a National 

Intelligence Council–produced collection of some 170 intelligence estimates on 

the region, from the first estimate on the subject by the one-year-old CIA in 1948 

to the last, “Assessment of the Situation in South Vietnam,” published in March 

1975. Hyperlinks to the online versions of these much longer works are provided 

throughout the digital form of this document. Yet another resource is the recently 

released collection of President’s Daily Briefs produced during the administrations of 

Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. 

Disclaimer. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed in the articles 

contained in this anthology are those of the authors. Nothing in them should be 

construed as asserting or implying US government endorsement of the factual 

statements or interpretations contained in them. Studies in Intelligence often 

includes copyright-protected material and permission should be sought before 

reprinting material contained herein.
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia XII

SOUTH 

CHINA

SEA

GULF

OF

SIAM

TONLE

SAP

GULF

OF

TONKIN

MEKONG

MEKONG

RED RED

BLACK

MEKONG

C A M B O D I A

THAILAND

CHINA

LAOS

BURMA

Hainan

Dao

CHINA

ANNAM

COCHIN

CHINA

TONKIN

INDOCHINA

0 50 100 150 miles

0 50 100 150 kilometers

The French governed Indochina until 1953. Laos and Cambodia gained 

independence in November 1953.

MPG 16-7607 6-16
1 CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

The First US Foray into Indochina

The March 1965 arrival of US Marines on South 

Vietnam’s northern beaches was not the first US foray 

into the region. As far back as 1944, units of the Office 

of Strategic Services (OSS), the Central Intelligence 

Agency’s predecessor organization, were in contact with 

Vietnamese guerrilla groups operating in Tonkin, then part 

of the larger French colony of Indochina, which comprised 

Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In 1945, an OSS team 

appeared from bases in Kunming, China, to collect 

intelligence on Japanese military strength and movements 

and to set up escape and evasion routes for downed 

Allied pilots.

Members of this group, known as the Deer Team, 

encountered members of a Vietnamese resistance 

organization known as the Viet Minh (League for the 

Independence of Vietnam). Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen 

Giap established the group in May 1941 just after 

Japan had occupied Indochina—seven months before 

the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States 

into World War II. By 1945, the Viet Minh had set up a 

broad-based anti-Japanese guerrilla group consisting of 

nationalist noncommunist and communist Vietnamese 

who concurrently opposed French occupation of the 

region. The OSS team met with Ho and, determining that 

the Viet Minh were well motivated and organized, began 

to provide training and arms to support their resistance 

to the Japanese and to collect intelligence during the 

summer of 1945.

Indochina–In Support of a Colonial Power, 1945–54

World War II’s Aftermath

When Japan surrendered to the Allies in August 1945, 

Imperial forces in Indochina laid down their arms, leaving 

a power vacuum in the country. On 15 August, the 

Viet Minh, by then a large armed presence throughout 

Vietnam, seized a good portion of the country. OSS 

members accompanied Ho into Hanoi, where on 

2 September 1945 he declared Vietnam’s independence 

from France. Maj. Archimedes Patti of the Deer Team 

stood on the stage next to Ho during the address and 

listened to Ho quote passages from the US Declaration 

of Independence, which Patti had given him some time 

before. Three weeks later, on 26 September 1945, the 

first American serviceman died in Vietnam—OSS Maj. 

Albert Peter Dewey (USA), shot and killed at a Viet Minh 

roadblock in Saigon, a victim of mistaken identity. 

When the Deer Team left Vietnam in October 1945 

with the demobilization of the OSS, Patti and others 

sent reports to Washington encouraging a constructive 

relationship with Ho and the new Vietnamese government. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, like most Americans, 

was a steadfast anti-imperialist and believed European 

colonization of Asia was a root cause of World War II. 

Roosevelt also was a Francophobe and disliked French 

leader Charles de Gaulle. He thought the French had 

always been poor colonial administrators and were now a 

spent force in world affairs. 

Header photo: The banner headline of the French newspaper 

Le Monde of 8 May 1954 proclaimed, “The Vietminh open 

new and furious effort to reach a decision in Dien Bien Phu.” 

Part I: Historical Overviews
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 2

Part I: Historical Overviews

Patti’s advice would have received a sympathetic hearing 

in the White House had Roosevelt still been living. FDR 

had opposed a French return to Indochina, instead 

pressing the idea of a United Nations trusteeship until 

an indigenous government, presumably representative 

of the people, could take over. Naturally, de Gaulle flatly 

rejected the idea. British Prime Minister Winston S. 

Churchill similarly opposed Roosevelt’s plan, viewing UN 

trusteeships and the dissolution of the French empire as 

prelude toward a parallel dismantling of the much larger 

British Empire.

In the weeks after Roosevelt’s death on 12 April 1945, 

the French had made it known to the new president, 

Harry S. Truman, that they would neither support US 

policies in postwar Europe nor support the United States 

in its dealings with an increasingly aggressive and 

bellicose Soviet Union unless Washington supported a 

French return to Indochina. The United States determined 

that concerns about Europe outweighed those of other 

areas of the world, and the Truman administration 

acquiesced and then actively supported French efforts to 

reestablish colonial rule in Indochina.

The First Indochina War Begins

The French incited the First Indochina War by forcefully 

reoccupying northern Vietnam in the fall of 1946, driving 

the Viet Minh from the cities into the countryside. 

The early years of this war consisted of a low-intensity 

guerrilla conflict throughout Indochina, though primarily 

in heavily populated areas of Vietnam and especially in 

Tonkin in the north. Within five years, many in France 

and the United States eventually came to see the 

continuing colonial war in Indochina as just another part 

of the global Cold War pitting the West, and especially 

the United States, against the Soviet Union. 

US leaders generally accepted the validity of the “Domino 

Theory”—that held that if one nation in a region fell to 

communism, then its neighbors would inevitably fall, 

one “domino” after another. US officials thus came to 

see the insurgency in Vietnam as a communist-inspired 

first domino in Southeast Asia. US leaders also tended 

to see the existence of a monolithic communism in 

which communists everywhere operated in lockstep 

with dictates and vast conspiratorial plans for world 

conquest emanating from Moscow. Thus, the Truman and 

Eisenhower administrations believed that a pro-Western 

Vietnam was crucial to the containment of communism, 

especially any southward expansion of the influence 

of the People’s Republic of China, which had been 

established under Mao Zedong in October 1949. 

US Funding and Presence in the 

French Indochina War

As a result, in 1950 the United States began to provide 

funding for the French military effort against the Viet 

Minh. Washington also formally recognized the Frenchsponsored Vietnamese government of Emperor Bao Dai. 

By 1953, the United States was funding roughly 80 

percent of the cost of the Indochina War, employing the 

French as a proxy and bulwark against communism in 

Southeast Asia. 

CIA placed its first intelligence operatives in Saigon and 

Hanoi in 1950, soon after the Truman administration 

officially recognized the Bao Dai government. These 

operatives soon reported to Washington that Ho was a 

populist hero with widespread support in both North and 

South Vietnam. Moreover, even with US equipment and 

money, the French were losing.

The French adopted a static military strategy in Vietnam, 

building a series of pillboxes, bunkers, and fortified 

strongpoints throughout the most populated areas of 

the north. Half a dozen French or French colonial troops 

occupied each location, but none would venture from 

their defenses. The US Military Assistance and Advisory 

Group, Indochina (MAAG), which had been established 

in 1950, unsuccessfully warned against use of this 

military strategy. Although the French experienced some 

brief success in 1951, they had lost control of the war 

by 1954—at that point French forces in Indochina had 

suffered more than 140,000 casualties, more than half 

of whom had been killed. Public support at home for 

what the French public had begun to call “The Dirty 

War” (Le Sale Guerre) declined sharply before the final 

significant French defeat between March and May 1954 

at Dien Bien Phu in western Tonkin on the Laotian 

border. There, Giap’s army surrounded and annihilated a 

sizeable French force.

Indochina–In Support of a Colonial Power, 1945–54
3

Part I: Historical Overviews

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

The Geneva Settlement of 1954

As that battle raged, US, French, British, Soviet, and 

Chinese delegations met in Geneva, Switzerland, to 

discuss Cold War issues, including those associated 

with the recently concluded Korean War and the fate of 

Indochina. When Dien Bien Phu fell, the French resolved 

to leave Indochina. By the terms of the international 

agreement reached in Geneva, Ho and the communists 

were to control Vietnam north of the 17th Parallel. Laos 

and Cambodia became neutral monarchies, and Emperor 

Bao Dai and his prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, were to 

administer the state of Vietnam below the 17th Parallel 

until elections in July 1956 decided on the leadership 

of a unified Vietnam. Neither the United States nor the 

South Vietnamese signed the final agreement. 

In the wake of the Geneva settlement, then DCI Allen 

Dulles told Eisenhower’s National Security Council that 

victory in the battle of Dien Bien Phu had tremendously 

boosted Ho’s popularity. If elections took place as 

planned in July 1956, Ho would easily win and bring all 

of Vietnam under communist control. Dulles later recalled 

that the most “disheartening feature of the news from 

Indochina in the summer of 1954 was the evidence that 

a majority of the people in Vietnam supported the Viet 

Minh rebels.”

Studies Selections:

LePage, Jean-Marc and Elie Tenenbaum. “French 

and American Intelligence Relations during the First 

Indochina War, 1950–1954.” Studies in Intelligence 55, 

no. 3 (2011): 19–27. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Swift, Carleton A., Richard D. Kovar, and Russell J. 

Bowen. “Intelligence in Recent Public Literature: Why 

Vietnam? Prelude to America’s Albatross.” Studies 

in Intelligence 25, no. 2 (1981): 99–116. Originally 

UNCLASSIFIED.

Indochina–In Support of a Colonial Power, 1945–54
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 4

Part I: Historical Overviews

Map from Thomas L. Ahern, Jr., CIA and Rural Pacification in South 

Vietnam (Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2001). Originally classified, 

the book was declassified in 2009. See cia.gov, FOIA Electronic Reading 

Room, Vietnam Histories.

MPG 752085AI (C00033) 2-00
5

Part I: Historical Overviews

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

The Republic of Vietnam,

Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954–65

US Advisers Arrive in South Vietnam

In an effort to reduce Ho’s popularity and maintain a 

friendly, noncommunist Vietnamese government, the 

Eisenhower administration began to bolster the regime in 

the south. On 26 June 1954, CIA established the Saigon 

Military Mission under Air Force Col. Edward Lansdale. 

Lansdale operated from the US Embassy in Saigon as 

an air attaché and was charged with shoring up the Bao 

Dai/Diem regime. At the same time, the United States 

vastly increased its military support to South Vietnam to 

include the dispatch of some 300 military advisers.

Lansdale developed a close friendship with Diem. From 

1954 until late 1956, he helped the prime minister 

survive several coups d’état by bribing opposition leaders 

and rigging an election in 1955 that ousted Bao Dai 

and established the Republic of Vietnam under Diem. 

Lansdale tried to convince Diem to become a “man of 

the people” and to reach out to the peasantry, something 

Diem disliked doing. Lansdale also advised him to create 

civic action programs, improve the rural infrastructure 

and educational system, and undertake land reform and 

a host of other programs to gain popular support—to 

win peasant “hearts and minds.” Initially the United 

States viewed Diem, in President Eisenhower’s words, 

as “the miracle man of Asia,” the leader who could turn 

everything around in South Vietnam.

Lansdale Operations in North Vietnam

At the same time, Lansdale orchestrated a series of 

psychological and covert operations in North Vietnam, 

believing that while the United States did all it could 

to stabilize the South, it could also undermine Ho 

in the North. These operations included destroying 

government printing presses, encouraging emigration, 

recruiting “stay-behind” teams, burying weapons caches, 

attempting to close the port of Haiphong, contaminating 

petroleum supplies, and sabotaging rail and bus lines. A 

number of CIA-sponsored paramilitary groups infiltrated 

the North under the direction of CIA’s Lucien Conein. 

While these covert operations had mixed results, one 

effort in 1954 and 1955, a propaganda campaign 

known as Operation Exodus, ultimately convinced 1.25 

million North Vietnamese Catholics to emigrate to the 

south. With the aid of the US Navy’s 7th Fleet and CIA 

proprietary airlines, hordes of terror-stricken evacuees 

fled as news cameras captured dramatic footage that 

would be shown worldwide. The campaign’s slogan, “God 

has Gone South,” reverberated around the world and 

blackened Ho’s hitherto untarnished public reputation in 

the world. When the evacuation ended, so did most of 

Lansdale’s other covert operations. The Saigon Military 

Mission (and thus the CIA) closed its doors in December 

1956. The 1956 election to determine the final 

government of a unified Vietnam had not been held.

Enter the Viet Cong and Viet Cong Infrastructure

By the late 1950s, the United States began to 

have doubts about the stubborn and uncooperative 

Header photo: Special Forces team quarters in Civilian 

Irregular Defense Group Headquarters in Khe Sanh, Quang 

Tri Province, ca. 1963. CIA photo.
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 6

Part I: Historical Overviews

The Republic of Vietnam, Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954–65

president of South Vietnam they supported. Diem’s 

increasingly autocratic and dictatorial policies proved 

counterproductive to US aims, and, by 1959, he 

led an unpopular and repressive police state run by 

cronies and family members. Members of the Viet 

Minh, who had remained in the South and continued 

to be loyal to Ho and the communist regime in the 

North, became the prime targets of the Diem regime. 

They responded by beginning a guerrilla campaign to 

topple Diem’s government. This indigenous opposition, 

which Diem in 1956 branded the Viet Cong (VC—a 

contraction for Vietnamese Communists), received 

increasing aid from the North, primarily in the form of 

political and military cadres and arms, although not yet 

North Vietnamese troops.

The VC drew its members from the South Vietnamese 

population and formed one of several forces that the 

US military and CIA faced. One group of VC, divided 

into local, district, and provincial irregular forces, was 

composed of peasants dressed in traditional black 

pajama-style clothing and sandals made of old tires who 

worked in the fields by day and took up arms at night. 

After 1961, another Viet Cong group, called the People’s 

Liberation Front, created main force units consisting of 

organized conventional units with formalized command 

structures and uniforms. 

Complementing and assisting these military forces was 

the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI), a virtual government 

paralleling Saigon’s. It was composed of political 

commissars, military recruiters, tax collectors, and 

functionaries operating throughout South Vietnam’s 

villages. Competing with the Saigon government for 

influence, by 1965 the VCI maintained a near full-time 

presence in upwards of 80 percent of the villages and 

hamlets of the south. Until the VCI’s arrival, some areas, 

such as the heavily populated Binh Dinh Province on 

the coast, had never been under government control 

after 1945. The VCI became a primary CIA target in the 

late 1960s.

CIA Returns to Lead Irregular Groups

After a five-year hiatus, CIA returned to Vietnam in 

1961, when 93 operations officers arrived to establish 

the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups, or CIDG. The 

CIDG was the idea of Gilbert Layton and David Nuttle, 

who believed that defending the civilian population from 

the Viet Cong through village-based programs could 

defeat the communists. They drew on the experiences of 

those who had served with the Saigon Military Mission. 

With the help of hundreds of US Army Special Forces 

soldiers, part of the recently created Green Berets who 

supplemented the CIA effort with much-needed firepower 

and logistics, the program combined self-defense training 

with social and economic initiatives to gain the allegiance 

of the rural highlands people. 

CIA determined that rural peasants, a relatively immobile 

population composed of tight-knit social groups, had 

thorough knowledge of local terrain and were willing to 

defend their villages against Viet Cong intimidation or 

attacks. Civic action programs such as these were an 

integral part of the CIDG’s mission, which sought to 

improve the standard of living for the rural population 

while rolling back VCI gains. CIA created several CIDG 

teams in the central highlands of South Vietnam.

CIA’s officers began by first using the Montagnard 

hill people as a test group. The Montagnards lived in 

relatively isolated areas and received no protection or 

services from the South Vietnamese government. Trained 

and equipped by CIA and assisted by Green Berets, the 

CIDG militias did very well in combat against Viet Cong 

forces in their local areas. Due to overwhelming CIDG 

successes in 1962 and 1963, the South Vietnamese 

government could declare the central highlands province 

of Darlac entirely clear of communist influence. By 

mid-1963, the CIDG operated 27 camps, controlling 

40,000 militia and 11,000 strike force troops. They 

succeeded in securing several hundred villages, inhabited 

by some 300,000 civilians, over an area of several 

hundred square miles.

SWITCHBACK: CIA Loses CIDG

As the CIDG program appeared to be succeeding in 

1962, CIA leaders requested additional Special Forces 

personnel to expand operations into the more heavily 

populated lowland areas of the South. The request 

caught the attention of US military leaders, who were in 

the process of expanding the US military role in South 

Vietnam. Although CIA was using only some 400 Special 

Forces personnel at the time of its request, the newly 

created Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) 
7

Part I: Historical Overviews

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

held that the Green Beret mission should emphasize 

offensive combat operations and not static pacification 

or peasant militia programs. Army leaders believed that 

the CIDG program represented a CIA-directed misuse of 

the Special Forces. In addition, military leaders pointed 

out that the CIA role in CIDG had expanded beyond its 

original mission to carry out small covert actions. 

In part, this perspective was a product of the Bay of Pigs 

debacle in Cuba in early 1961, after which the John F. 

Kennedy administration concluded that CIA could not 

effectively run large paramilitary operations. As a result, 

in 1963 the administration endorsed transfer—Operation 

SWITCHBACK—of the CIDG program from CIA to MACV. 

This effectively ended CIA participation in paramilitary 

programs of its own creation for several years to come.

Thereafter, CIA provided only advice, assistance, and 

intelligence to MACV programs. The Special Forces took 

over the CIDG program and entirely changed its scope. 

What had been a set of village defense units responsible 

for localized rural security became mercenary long-range 

reconnaissance and patrol units that redeployed to the 

Laotian and Cambodian borders.

Strategic Hamlet Program 

In addition to the CIDG program, and in cooperation with 

the Saigon government, CIA helped launch in February 

1962 another ambitious village-level counterinsurgency 

effort. Ngo Dinh Nhu, President Diem’s brother, directed 

the initiative, which included the Strategic Hamlet 

Program. Like an earlier effort known as the Agroville 

Program (1959–61), the Strategic Hamlet Program aimed 

to move peasants from areas of Viet Cong influence into 

fortified village compounds. There, land redistribution 

and social programs presumably would win the allegiance 

of the populace. By the end of 1962, more than 2,600 

hamlets had been relocated and fortified. The program 

had critical flaws, however. First, it proved difficult, 

if not impossible, to identify and separate Viet Cong 

members among the South Vietnamese peasants. The 

Strategic Hamlets themselves also proved easy targets. 

The entire program remained underfunded, understaffed, 

and underdefended. Eventually, it came to epitomize 

the corruption, inefficiency, and repressive nature 

of the Diem regime and created resentment among 

displaced peasants.

The Downfall of the Diem Regime

The Kennedy administration found stabilization efforts 

increasingly difficult. Diem’s continuing repressive 

policies proved ever more counterproductive, especially 

in the summer of 1963 when South Vietnamese troops 

acting on Diem’s orders ruthlessly put down nationwide 

antigovernment Buddhist demonstrations. This action 

blatantly contradicted promises Diem had made to 

President Kennedy. 

Although the US government officially continued to 

support a democratic South Vietnam, several individuals 

in the US State Department and the National Security 

Council wanted to get rid of Diem’s regime with a 

replacement more amenable to US advice. Then DCI 

John McCone, among others, opposed a coup, however. 

He predicted that a series of revolving-door governments 

worse than Diem’s would result and hinder further gains 

or destroy what had been achieved to date. 

McCone also predicted a coup would result in 

deterioration of the military situation. He later recalled 

that he had told President Kennedy in the fall of 1963, 

“Mr. President, if I was manager of a baseball team, 

[and] I had only one pitcher, I would keep him on the 

mound whether he was a good pitcher or not.” McCone 

did not instruct CIA personnel to support, hinder, or in 

any way prevent officers in the Army of the Republic of 

Vietnam (ARVN) from staging a coup. Nearly 15 years of 

US military, diplomatic, and financial aid had failed to 

create a stable government in South Vietnam.

Through the summer and fall of 1963, a cabal of ARVN 

generals plotted to topple Diem. CIA’s Lucien Conein 

served as a covert liaison between the US ambassador 

to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and the 

senior officers plotting the coup, and while he had no 

responsibility for assisting or advising the plotters, he 

appears to have informed US officials in-country of an 

imminent revolt. 

The coup against Diem started on the morning of 

1 November 1963. Although Diem and his brother 

escaped from the presidential palace in Saigon that day, 

they later agreed to turn themselves over to the rebellious 

generals for safe passage out of the country. Instead, an 

ARVN officer shot and killed both men in the back of an 

The Republic of Vietnam, Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954–65
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 8

Part I: Historical Overviews

armored personnel carrier. The killings came as a shock 

to US leaders, especially President Kennedy, who never 

wanted a coup to end in that way. 

The Johnson Administration Faces Larger War

As McCone had predicted, after Diem’s death the 

Republic of Vietnam endured a succession of shortlived juntas for nearly two years. Fourteen governments, 

comprising ARVN generals and civilians, unsuccessfully 

attempted to create political stability and mount an 

effective military response to the Viet Cong, who, with 

growing assistance from North Vietnamese cadres, 

expanded control over more areas of South Vietnam.

Nearly 15 years of US military, diplomatic, and 

financial aid beginning in 1950 had failed to have any 

significant impact on creation of a stable government 

in South Vietnam. This situation frustrated those in the 

administration of Lyndon B. Johnson who had become 

president on 22 November 1963 after John F. Kennedy’s 

assassination in Dallas, Texas. 

In early 1964, President Johnson asked DCI McCone for 

CIA’s assessment of the Vietnam situation, particularly 

why American efforts to date had produced no positive 

or lasting results. He also asked CIA analysts to assess 

what would happen to the rest of Southeast Asia if Laos 

and Vietnam came under North Vietnamese control. 

On 9 June 1964, CIA responded that, 

. . . with the possible exception of Cambodia, it is unlikely 

that any nation in the area would quickly succumb to 

Communism as the result of the fall of Laos and South 

Vietnam. Furthermore, a continuation of Communism in 

the area would not be inexorable and any spread which 

did occur would take time—time in which the total 

situation may change in any number of ways unfavorable 

to the Communist cause.

The CIA analysis in 1964 conceded that the loss of 

Vietnam and Laos would profoundly damage the US 

position in the Far East and raise the prestige of China 

as a leader of world communism at the expense of the 

Soviet Union. Yet the CIA concluded that 

 . . . so long as the United States could retain its bases, 

such as those in Okinawa, Guam, the Philippines, and 

Japan, it would wield enough military power in Asia 

to deter China and North Vietnam from overt military 

aggression against Southeast Asia in general. Even in the 

worst-case scenario if Vietnam and Laos were to fall, the 

United States would still retain some leverage to affect 

the final outcome in Southeast Asia. 

This analysis clearly refuted the Domino Theory 

accepted by the US government since the mid-1950s. 

In addition, CIA continued to send pessimistic reports 

that the insurgency in South Vietnam was growing even 

more threatening. The analysis had little impact on the 

Johnson administration. The president largely ignored 

the assessment and continued to treat South Vietnam 

as the first domino under attack by monolithic world 

communism under Ho Chi Minh, a communist puppet of 

the Kremlin. 

Indeed, by late 1964 evidence was mounting that fully 

equipped North Vietnamese regulars of the People’s 

Army of Vietnam (PAVN) were entering South Vietnam 

in substantial numbers via a supply route—the Ho Chi 

Minh Trail—through Laos and Cambodia. Their presumed 

intent: to capitalize on South Vietnam’s instability and 

overthrow the government before increased US military 

and financial aid arrived.

In Washington, notwithstanding the CIA estimate, 

these developments prompted a wholesale change 

of perspective. Until then, policymakers had viewed 

communist activities in South Vietnam as homegrown, 

with some outside support. The Johnson administration 

took the view that North Vietnam had initiated and 

continued to feed the conflict. With that decision, the 

United States would take aggressive steps against North 

Vietnam to convince the communist leadership in Hanoi 

to cease its campaign to take over the South.

Infiltration into the North

Johnson’s response was to intensify pressure on North 

Vietnam through conventional military and clandestine 

means. In early 1964, MACV developed plans for a series 

of covert operations against the North. The Operations 

Plan, or OPLAN 34A, was a military-controlled repetition 

of CIA paramilitary and sabotage operations against the 

North that had already produced dismal results on a 

smaller scale. 

The Republic of Vietnam, Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954–65
9

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CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

The MACV initiatives also failed. In fact, one such 

operation precipitated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident when, 

in early August 1964, North Vietnamese gunboats 

attacked US Navy vessels. Before the attack, MACV, 

under OPLAN 34A had assisted South Vietnamese 

commando raids on radar installations on the southern 

coast of North Vietnam. Simultaneously, the US Navy 

was conducting electronic intelligence (ELINT) collection 

missions nearby in the South China Sea. The North 

Vietnamese, thinking these US Navy destroyers were part 

of the recent coastal raids, attacked the USS Maddox 

and later, contemporaries thought, the USS Turner Joy.

The Johnson administration viewed the North Vietnamese 

actions as a direct provocation and, according to 

contingency plans already in place under OPLAN 34A, 

launched reprisal airstrikes against targets in the North 

(known as Operation PIERCE ARROW) as a warning to 

Hanoi not to launch further attacks and to cease aiding 

the Viet Cong in the South. At the same time, President 

Johnson sought a resolution from Congress authorizing 

him to use military force to protect American lives from 

communist attacks in the region. 

The CIA analysis of the Gulf of Tonkin incident 

maintained that the attacks on the US destroyers by the 

North Vietnamese were a defensive reaction motivated 

by the North Vietnamese belief that the ELINT vessels 

were supporting the South Vietnamese commando raids. 

CIA concluded that the communists did not intend 

their actions to appear as a direct provocation to the 

United States. 

The reprisals did not prevent additional communist 

aggression targeting US military personnel in South 

Vietnam between late 1964 and early 1965, resulting 

in American deaths. By late 1964 and early 1965, 

CIA assessments stated that the Viet Cong—with the 

advantage of increased North Vietnamese aid—were 

stronger than ever and that South Vietnam was on the 

verge of defeat.

In response to increased Viet Cong provocations and 

growing strength, the Johnson administration initiated 

a graduated bombing program against North Vietnam 

known as Operation FLAMING DART. That was soon 

followed by a more intense and sustained bombing 

campaign known as Operation ROLLING THUNDER. 

The administration believed these bombing campaigns 

would convince Hanoi that assistance to the Viet Cong 

would carry an increasing cost in damage to the North’s 

fledgling industrial infrastructure and that the leadership 

in Hanoi would seek respite through a negotiated end to 

the conflict. ROLLING THUNDER took place between 

March 1965 and October 1968, with bombing runs 

by Navy aircraft-carrier-based air units on the Yankee 

Station in the South China Sea and by Air Force units 

based in South Vietnam.

Following the start of the bombing campaign, the 

Johnson administration committed the first large 

detachment of US Marines to Da Nang, South Vietnam, 

on 8 March 1965 to protect air bases there. In April 

1965, General William C. Westmoreland, the MACV 

commander, warned that the situation in South Vietnam 

was dire. Acting on this, the Joint Chiefs of Staff 

committed US ground forces to prevent the imminent 

collapse of Vietnam, sending three US Army divisions 

to help stabilize the government and enable the South 

Vietnamese Army to defend the nation on their own.

On the same day in 1965 that the United States decided 

on a sizeable troop commitment to South Vietnam, 

CIA issued a special memorandum that emphasized 

the bleakness of the US position there. CIA analysts 

noted that Viet Cong strength stood at roughly 150,000 

men and that, if the US committed large numbers of 

ground combat forces into South Vietnam, it ran the 

risk of Americans assuming an even greater share of 

the fighting.

Just before DCI McCone resigned in April 1965, in 

part due to policy differences with President Johnson 

over the escalation, he sent a letter to the president in 

which he stated that based on CIA operative reports, 

ROLLING THUNDER was not working as planned and 

would fail to achieve its intended goals. McCone warned 

President Johnson that the United States risked “an 

ever-increasing commitment of US personnel without 

materially improving the chances of victory . . . In effect, 

we will find ourselves mired down in combat in the jungle 

in a military effort that we cannot win, and from which 

we will have extreme difficulty in extracting ourselves.”

The Republic of Vietnam, Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954–65
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 10

Part I: Historical Overviews

Studies Selections:

Ahern, Thomas L. Jr. “The CIA and the Government 

of Ngo Dinh Diem.” Studies in Intelligence 37, no. 4 

(1993): 41–51. Originally SECRET—Released in part.

Allen, George W. “Covering Coups in Saigon.” Studies 

in Intelligence 33, no. 4 (1989): 57–61. Originally 

SECRET—Released in part.

Hartness, William M. “Aspects of Counterinsurgency 

Intelligence.” Studies in Intelligence 7, no. 4 (1963): 

71–83. Originally CONFIDENTIAL—Released in full. 

Matthias, Willard C. “How Three Estimates Went Wrong.” 

Studies in Intelligence 12, no. 1 (1968): 27–38. 

Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in part.

Palmer, Gen. Bruce. “US Intelligence and Vietnam.” 

Studies in Intelligence 28, no. 5 (Special Issue, 1984). 

Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in part.

Schiattareggia, M. H. “Counterintelligence in CounterGuerrilla Operations.” Studies in Intelligence 6, no. 3 

(1962): 1–24. Originally SECRET—Released in full 

and reprinted in Studies in Intelligence 57, No. 2 (June 

2013): 39–63.

Schwarzchild, Edward T. “The Assessment of 

Insurgency.” Studies in Intelligence 7, no. 4 (1963): 

85–89. Originally SECRET—Released in full. 

Smith, Russell Jack. “Intelligence Production during the 

Helms Regime.” Studies in Intelligence 39, no. 4 (1995): 

93–102. Originally SECRET—Released in part. 

Steinmeyer, Walter. “The Intelligence Role in 

Counterinsurgency.” Studies in Intelligence 9, no. 4 

(1965): 57–63. Originally SECRET—Released in full and 

reprinted in Studies in Intelligence 59, no. 4 (December 

2015). Steinmeyer is a penname for a former senior 

operations officer, Theodore Shackley.

The Republic of Vietnam, Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954-65
11

Part I: Historical Overviews

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

A US Air Force O-1 observation plane, shown here overflying South 

Vietnam. The aircraft was used throughout Southeast Asia to spot, target, 

and evaluate strikes on enemy forces. US Air Force photo.
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 12

Part I: Historical Overviews

Map from Thomas L. Ahern, Jr., CIA and Rural Pacification in South 

Vietnam (Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2001). Originally classified, 

the book was declassified in 2009. See cia.gov, FOIA Electronic Reading 

Room, Vietnam Histories.

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Part I: Historical Overviews

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

The War “Goes Big,” 1965–75

The “Other War” Against VCI Languishes

The United States fought a conventional—sometimes 

termed “Big Unit”—war in Vietnam during most of the 

second half of the 1960s and early 1970s. Between 

1965 and 1973, more than 2 million US troops rotated 

into and out of Southeast Asia. Their number reached a 

peak in South Vietnam of approximately 570,000 in early 

1969. During this period, both US and South Vietnamese 

forces paid only passing attention to rural pacification 

and village-level security, what many later termed “the 

other war” against the Viet Cong Infrastructure. 

The CIA never regarded the conflict in Southeast Asia as 

its primary target for intelligence collection or analysis. 

Nor did it regard military support as its primary mission. 

Instead, CIA focused on the greater threats posed by the 

nuclear-armed Soviet Union and the People’s Republic 

of China. Still, CIA reached a maximum commitment of 

some 500 personnel in-country in 1968.

As seen in the introduction to Part I, CIA waged a 

different sort of war from US conventional forces early on 

in Southeast Asia, focusing on rural security programs, 

which it continued to do as a conventional war went on 

around them. During this period, the US military adopted 

a nationwide “search-and-destroy” strategy, involving 

highly mobile helicopter-borne forces and intensive 

firepower. It was a war of attrition, with “body counts” 

serving as measures of success. 

Meanwhile, the ROLLING THUNDER bombing campaign 

against North Vietnam initiated in 1965 and carried out 

through late 1968 never produced the desired results. 

The lack of a modern military-industrial infrastructure 

in the North meant that strategic bombing, like the 

kind used in World War II, had little impact on the 

communists’ ability to wage war, their will to persist, or 

their ability to provide manpower and materiel support to 

the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese forces fighting 

in the South. Intended as a political-diplomatic tool to 

induce the North to enter into negotiations, rather than as 

a potentially war-ending and devastating military weapon, 

ROLLING THUNDER achieved neither end.

“Escalating Stalemate”

As DCI John McCone had predicted, the responsibilities 

of the US military grew as the communists matched each 

US troop commitment in an “escalating stalemate,” all 

while the South Vietnamese role diminished. CIA analysts 

had noted as early as 1965 that the South Vietnamese 

government and military were fraught with incompetence, 

factionalism, and corruption, which only aided the 

communists. Meanwhile, every pessimistic assessment 

of US foreign policy and real or implied criticism of the 

military delivered to the Oval Office further alienated 

the DCI and his agency from President Johnson, top 

policymakers in the Defense and State Departments, and 

military commanders and their intelligence staffs. The 

administration came to conclude that CIA was not a team 

player. John McCone left the CIA in early April 1965 

convinced that the the administration would ultimately 

fail to achieve a stable, democratic, and friendly Republic 

of Vietnam.

Header photo: US Marines landing in South Vietnam on 

8 March 1965. US Marine Corps photo.
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 14

Part I: Historical Overviews

The War “Goes Big,” 1965–75

A New DCI and a “Vietnam Center” at CIA

McCone’s replacement as DCI was a retired, highly 

decorated US naval officer with significant combat 

command experience, Vice Admiral William F. 

“Red” Raborn. Sworn in on 28 April 1965, Raborn 

would spend only 14 months as DCI. Although he 

would be much underrated in CIA history, Raborn’s 

interaction with the president over Vietnam policies 

were considerably less fraught than those of McCone or 

Raborn’s successor, Richard M. Helms. 

One of DCI Raborn’s most noteworthy innovations 

was the August 1965 creation in CIA of the office of 

the Special Assistant for Vietnam Affairs (SAVA), a 

“wild directorate” into which every officer, and only 

the “spark plugs”—the best Vietnam analysts the 

CIA could muster—would be placed. Led by a senior 

officer with the rank of deputy director, SAVA would 

provide the one and only voice briefing the DCI and the 

president on Vietnam-related matters. While Raborn’s 

Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms 

had initially shown little enthusiasm for the new office, 

he soon began to appreciate the advantages of the 

centralization of multitudinous and disparate offices 

fielding demands posed by Vietnam, especially in 

controlling a daily and massive flow of cables, dispatches, 

and memoranda. SAVA soon became CIA’s clearinghouse 

for all Vietnam-related information from the four 

CIA directorates.

Richard Helms—The Third Vietnam—Era DCI—Takes Over

Richard Helms became DCI in 1966 at a time when 

White House meetings sounded like pep rallies for the 

war effort. Nevertheless, Helms felt that CIA “needed to 

stay at the table and keep the game honest.” He viewed 

with great pride invitations to the president’s exclusive 

“Tuesday Lunches,” where Johnson discussed policy 

in an informal setting with those he considered his top 

advisers. Throughout, however, CIA continued to provide 

accurate, realistic assessments, no matter how unpopular 

or pessimistic they might have been. Like McCone, 

Helms remained skeptical about the chances of a US 

military victory in Vietnam. While a staunch CIA advocate 

at the White House, he often clashed with military 

leaders over issues such as the effectiveness of ROLLING 

THUNDER, the control of covert actions, the strength 

and nature of communist military forces, and the lack of 

attention to rural security and pacification.

The most important controversy of Helms’s tenure 

involved contention over differing assessments of the size 

of communist units engaged in the South. Amid growing 

controversy over the war at home by 1967, the Johnson 

administration increased pressure on his military leaders 

to show progress. This they did by offering estimates 

that communist forces in South Vietnam had decreased 

significantly during two years of intensive combat action 

to some 270,000 fighters, largely North Vietnamese 

Army regulars. 

CIA assessments, however, were starkly at odds with 

MACV’s. CIA analysts estimated that 600,000 enemy 

fighters, including Viet Cong militias, Viet Cong Main 

Force units, and North Vietnamese regulars were 

actively engaged in South Vietnam. During a visit to the 

United States in late November 1967, General William 

Westmoreland, carrying the military’s estimate, stated 

publicly and before Congress that the war would soon 

wind down. Basing his judgment on big losses North 

Vietnamese forces were suffering in large unit actions 

at the time, he predicted an imminent and successful 

conclusion, perhaps within a year. 

CIA analysts countered that the military’s focus on North 

Vietnamese units ignored or dismissed as unimportant 

large numbers of Viet Cong militia and main force 

fighters. To avoid a schism within the intelligence and 

defense communities, Helms overruled his embattled 

analysts and allowed the removal of the larger CIA 

numbers from key judgments of order-of-battle estimates, 

relegating them to the back pages and agreeing to 

accept the military’s figures. President Johnson received 

a smaller, compromise count of 334,000 communist 

troops—larger than the MACV estimate but much smaller 

than CIA’s.

The 1968 Tet Turning Point

The communist offensive that erupted during Tet, the 

Vietnamese New Year holiday, in late January 1968, 

demonstrated the accuracy of CIA estimates, as the very 

units that CIA analysts had warned about and which 

MACV had dismissed carried out attacks on US and 

South Vietnamese forces throughout South Vietnam. 
15

Part I: Historical Overviews

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

The War “Goes Big,” 1965–75

Major assaults took place on high-profile targets in large 

urban centers including Saigon, Da Nang, and the ancient 

capital Hue. The ability of communist forces to conduct 

a monthlong, nationwide campaign essentially verified 

CIA assessments of the fighting capability and potential 

impact of Viet Cong irregular forces and the Viet Cong 

Infrastructure on the war in the South. The controversy 

was eventually settled in July 1970, with CIA estimates 

gaining acceptance as official figures to be used for 

planning purposes. 

The 1968 Tet offensive proved to be a turning point in 

the war. Although a communist military defeat, it was a 

psychological victory over the American public, which 

increasingly came to doubt Johnson administration 

pronouncements that the conflict would soon end in a 

US victory. In suggesting that the end of the conflict was 

nowhere in sight, the Tet offensive created a “credibility 

gap” between government statements about Vietnam 

and what appeared through news reports to actually be 

happening on the battlefields. It was a gap that would 

grow over time. Tet also revealed that the big-unit war 

waged since 1965 had not succeeded in inhibiting 

North Vietnamese efforts or in quelling the Viet Cong 

insurgency. If the communists retained the capability to 

launch a nationwide offensive like Tet, then American 

military and diplomatic policies needed to be reevaluated.

Studies Selections:

Atkins, Merle, Kenneth C. Fuller, and Bruce Smith. 

“‘Rolling Thunder’ and Bomb Damage to Bridges.” 

Studies in Intelligence 13, no. 4 (1969): 1–9. Originally 

SECRET//NOFORN—Released in full.

Ford, Harold P. “The US Decision to Go Big in Vietnam.” 

Studies in Intelligence 29, no. 1 (1985): 1–15. Originally 

SECRET//NOFORN—Released in full.

Hall, Arthur B. “Landscape Analysis.” Studies in 

Intelligence 11, no. 3 (1967): 65–75. Originally 

SECRET//NOFORN—Released in full.

Kitchens, Allen H. “Crisis and Intelligence: Two Case 

Studies [Tet and Iran].” Studies in Intelligence 28, no. 3 

(1984): 71–78. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Puchalla, Edward F. “Communist Defense Against Aerial 

Surveillance in Southeast Asia.” Studies in Intelligence

14, no. 2 (1970): 31–78. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—

Released in full.

Sinclair, Robert, “One Intelligence Analyst Remembers 

Another: A Review of Who the Hell Are We Fighting? The 

Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars.” 

Studies in Intelligence 50, No. 4 (2006): 1–9. Originally 

UNCLASSIFIED.

Tidwell, William A. “A New Kind of Air Targeting.” Studies 

in Intelligence 11, no. 1 (1967): 55–60. Originally 

CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN—Released in full.
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 16

Part I: Historical Overviews

Map from Thomas L. Ahern, Jr., CIA and Rural Pacification in South 

Vietnam (Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2001). Originally 

classified, the book was declassified in 2009. See cia.gov, FOIA 

Electronic Reading Room, Vietnam Histories.

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Part I: Historical Overviews

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

As the Big War Rages,

CIA Works at the Insurgency/Hamlet Level

The Tet offensive proved to be an intelligence boon for 

CIA. The Viet Cong, which had operated underground 

and in the shadows before the offensive, emerged into 

the open for the first time to carry out attacks. In doing 

so, they more clearly revealed numbers, locations, 

organizational structure, and leadership. As noted above, 

since the early 1960s, long before the introduction 

of major US ground forces, the CIA had urged a more 

intensive effort against the Viet Cong Infrastructure in 

the South. 

One of CIA’s chiefs of East Asian operations—and future 

DCI—William E. Colby was a student of communist 

guerrilla doctrine, and once noted Mao Zedong’s 

published reference to guerrillas moving among 

populations like fish in the sea. Colby would assert that a 

continual US and South Vietnamese effort to remove the 

guerrilla “fish” from the countryside was a requirement 

for a stable and secure South Vietnam. Yet CIA lacked 

the personnel and military support to conduct rural 

security and pacification efforts on its own. Even after 

the conclusion of Operation SWITCHBACK in 1963, 

however, CIA continued working on a much reduced 

scale with the South Vietnamese to promote development 

of rural self-defense units, predicated on the idea that 

arming, organizing, and training the peasantry to act 

on their own could succeed in wresting control of the 

countryside from the Viet Cong.

Beginning in April 1964, CIA introduced a scheme 

that came to be known as the “Oil Spot Approach” to 

building local security by starting in one small area and 

working gradually to spread security outward, like a spot 

of oil on water. The approach involved creation of small 

teams deployed throughout the countryside—political 

action teams, census-grievance teams, and counter-terror 

teams. The census grievance teams solicited villager 

concerns about security and the South Vietnamese 

government while also seeking to identify local Viet Cong 

cadre. The political action teams then attempted to 

“rally,” or persuade or convert, these local communists 

to support the South Vietnamese government, or, failing 

this, refer them to a counter-terror team for apprehension 

and imprisonment.

CIA and MACV Cooperate in CORDS

This CIA–South Vietnamese initiative remained small 

until May 1967, when MACV insisted on consolidating 

all military and civilian pacification efforts into one 

organization named Civil Operations and Revolutionary 

Development Support (CORDS). Both CIA and MACV 

participated in CORDS activities in close cooperation 

with the government of South Vietnam. MACV for its part 

created Military Assistance Teams consisting of small 

groups of US Army soldiers who lived in peasant hamlets, 

while organizing and training locals to serve in regional 

and Popular Force militia units to fight communist cells 

in their local areas, often without the assistance of 

larger US or South Vietnamese forces. Drawing on the 

experience of civic action programs undertaken earlier by 

Header photo: In 1961, Buon Enao village in Central South 

Vietnam’s Darlac Province was the first village organized for 

self-defense under the CIDG Program. CIA file photo.
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 18

Part I: Historical Overviews

As the Big War Rages, CIA Works at the Insurgency/Hamlet Level

US Marine units in northern South Vietnam, such efforts 

showed great promise in making a significant difference 

in the countryside, however slight the Pentagon’s support.

CIA veteran Robert Komer directed CORDS from May 

1967 until William E. Colby replaced him in 1968. A 

World War II OSS veteran, Colby joined the CIA in 1950. 

He served as chief of station in Saigon in 1959 and 

as chief of the Far Eastern Division starting in 1962. 

Like McCone and Helms, Colby viewed the bombing 

of the North and large unit military actions with great 

skepticism, propounding the theory that eradication 

of the existing communist parallel government in the 

South would win over the peasantry and win the war. 

He believed that allowing any remnants of the enemy 

to remain active would undermine whatever the US and 

South Vietnamese governments tried to do. 

Under CORDS, CIA concentrated on “winning hearts 

and minds” through long-overdue land reforms and 

infrastructure, economic, and agricultural development. 

It helped direct or redistribute about 2.5 million acres 

of land from wealthy landowners to the peasants, 

giving farmers a stake in the future of the nation and a 

reason to support the South Vietnamese government. 

CORDS, while working on village defense and civic action 

programs, also devoted resources to gathering intelligence 

intended to root out the Viet Cong Infrastructure. 

Phoenix

The controversial and largely misunderstood Phoenix 

Program fell under the broader CORDS umbrella. 

Although initiated, administered, and ostensibly 

controlled by the South Vietnamese government, Phoenix 

received funding and administrative, intelligence, 

and personnel support from both CIA and MACV. An 

expansion of the South Vietnamese government’s Chieu 

Hoi or “Open Arms” program created in 1961, Phuong 

Hoang—or Phoenix—originated in 1967 as a far more 

intensive and robust anti–Viet Cong initiative with 

intelligence collection and targeting at its core. 

Determining that knowing who was who in the enemy 

camp comprised a key element of any counterinsurgency 

program, CIA created the Intelligence Coordination 

and Exploitation (ICEX) centers at both provincial and 

district levels—eventually 103 in number. These centers 

focused on the collection, analysis, and dissemination 

of intelligence on specific, local members of the Viet 

Cong, creating individual dossiers on each suspect. 

There were A, B, C, and D grades of Viet Cong cadre 

identified through the program as it developed. Those 

designated as “A’s” were the most influential Viet Cong in 

South Vietnam; the letter “D” categorized the lower-level 

followers, referred to as “small fry.” While the program 

overwhelmingly collected intelligence and apprehended 

those in the D categories (small fry being more 

prevalent), it also recorded successes against top-level 

members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure. 

Dossiers created in the intelligence centers went to the 

various Phoenix field forces, which included Provincial 

Reconnaissance Units (PRUs), composed of Navy 

SEALs, Marines, and Army special operations groups, 

and CIA-directed and -led Vietnamese, Thai, and Chinese 

mercenary units, the Vietnamese National Police, and 

South Vietnamese Army Special Forces. These teams 

operated in the countryside, patrolling the villages 

and hamlets, attempting to identify and locate named 

individuals for apprehension and interrogation at the 

ICEX centers. The program emphasized the capture—not 

killing—of suspects, a canard advanced and perpetuated 

by critics of the war and protesters. Initially, CIA, with 

Vietnamese assistance, handled interrogations at the 

ICEX. In 1971, the South Vietnamese government took 

over all aspects of the program as CIA and US military 

participation ended. All told, about 600 Americans 

were directly involved in the interrogation of Viet 

Cong suspects in the ICEX, including both CIA and 

US military personnel.

Provincial Reconnaissance Units

The PRUs proved controversial. These special 

paramilitary units, originally developed in 1964 by the 

South Vietnamese government and CIA and known 

initially as the Counter-Terror Teams, eventually numbered 

some 3,000 members. Critics of US involvement in 

Vietnam referred to the PRUs as nothing more than 

targeted assassination teams. Yet PRU actions accounted 

for only 14 percent of those killed under the Phoenix 

Program. Indeed, most died in skirmishes and raids 

involving South Vietnamese soldiers and police and 

the US military. “A”-level Viet Cong leaders generally 
19

Part I: Historical Overviews

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

As the Big War Rages, CIA Works at the Insurgency/Hamlet Level

operated with an armed entourage and rarely submitted 

meekly to arrest or detention when PRUs confronted 

them. Firefights generally ensued as the result of any 

encounter, with the inevitable fatalities. 

According to CIA figures, Phoenix succeeded in 

eliminating some 30,000 members of the Viet Cong 

infrastructure. US Army estimates of VCI losses during 

this period are even greater. Phoenix and Tet, MACV 

noted, in conjunction with other rural security and militia 

programs, eliminated more than 80,000 Viet Cong 

in South Vietnam. Phoenix activities and pacification 

programs also succeeded in driving the remnants of 

the Viet Cong deep underground or into Cambodian or 

Laotian sanctuaries where their ability to affect events in 

South Vietnam declined precipitously by the time of the 

1972 Easter offensive. 

Communist leaders later confirmed the effectiveness of 

the Phoenix Program and its debilitating effect on the 

Viet Cong. Communist forces involved in the 1972 Easter 

offensive and the Final Offensive in 1975 consisted 

entirely of North Vietnamese regulars operating without 

Viet Cong assistance, the latter rendered ineffective as a 

political or military force. 

The Hamlet Evaluation System

The Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) adopted by MACV 

in October 1966 at the suggestion of National Security 

Advisor Walt Rostow also grew out of CIA’s earlier Census 

Grievance Program. Intended to measure the effect of all 

US-supported pacification and military activity based on 

six criteria, it represented an effort to create a national 

scorecard of progress in winning the war. Following 

his appointment to CORDS, Colby placed an increased 

emphasis on the HES to show patterns and trends. The 

Army did all the legwork. Soldiers went into the hamlets 

and villages of South Vietnam using a series of surveys 

and spot checks in an attempt to quantify the progress 

of rural security and pacification programs in the 

various locales. 

The Army took the surveys as proof of progress. 

Between 1970 and 1972, they revealed that a good 

majority of villages in the South finally had come under 

government control with allegedly 97 percent rated at 

least “moderately secure,” with half rated even higher. 

Critics of the system pointed out, however, that hamlet 

chieftains typically would tell survey teams what they 

thought the teams wanted to hear, and the moment they 

had left, the Viet Cong would return and reestablish 

their control. The overwhelming weight of evidence 

nonetheless indicates that CIA’s efforts did succeed in 

making the South Vietnamese countryside more secure 

after 1968.

CIA Technology in the War

CIA-developed technology played an enormous role in 

intelligence collection and support to the US military 

effort in Southeast Asia. In 1966, CIA’s Technical 

Services Division (TSD) developed a way to identify 

individuals who may have recently fired weapons or 

used explosives. Specialists employed a test for trace 

contamination that occurs when a person handles a 

metal object or explosive substance. Placed on the skin 

or clothing of a Viet Cong suspect, the chemicals would 

confirm recent firearm use or explosives contact. TSD 

declassified these “gunshot residue” tests in 1971 and 

shared the technology with US law enforcement agencies 

and some foreign intelligence services. TSD developed 

a wide variety of beacons and sensors to mark bombing 

targets and landing or exfiltration zones and to detect 

movement in the jungle or along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. 

It also designed a variety of tripwire mines, flares, and 

alarms to assist with perimeter defense.

An aspect of technical support only recently made public 

was the work of a TSD officer who devised measures that 

allowed US POWs held in North Vietnam to exchange 

messages with US military officials in the United States. 

These communications provided insights into the 

identities of POWs, conditions within POW camps, and 

even escape plans.

Between May 1967 and May 1968, the CIA-developed 

supersonic aircraft, the A-12 Archangel, made 

appearances over the theater. In its short lifespan, the 

A-12 provided reconnaissance of North Vietnamese air 

defenses and troop deployments, until it was replaced by 

the Air Force variant, the SR-71 Blackbird. 
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 20

Part I: Historical Overviews

As the Big War Rages, CIA Works at the Insurgency/Hamlet Level

The Approaching End of the War

In the fall of 1972 and early 1973, Henry Kissinger, 

the advisor to the president for national security affairs 

(and later secretary of state), was instrumental in secret 

negotiations ending US involvement in Vietnam, although 

to critics, the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 left 

too many communist troops in the South. Following the 

agreement, Kissinger and President Nixon promised 

South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu that if 

North Vietnam committed wholesale violations of the 

settlement, the United States would respond with aerial 

bombardment and increased aid. However, when Nixon 

resigned in August 1974 in the wake of the Watergate 

Affair, the guarantees made to Thieu went with him.

Many in the CIA felt, as did analyst Frank Snepp, that 

the peace accords created a deliberate “decent interval,” 

a period between US withdrawal in 1973 and an 

eventual South Vietnamese collapse that would absolve 

the United States of any direct responsibility for its fall 

to communism. The debates over whether the decent 

interval ever existed still rages among historians today, in 

spite of decades of denials from policymakers serving at 

the time. 

Studies Selections:

Elkes, Martin C. “The LAMS Story.” Studies in 

Intelligence 19, no. 2 (1975): 29–34. Originally 

SECRET—Released in part.

Finlayson, Andrew R. “The Tay Ninh Provincial 

Reconnaissance Unit and Its Role in the Phoenix 

Program, 1969–70.” Studies in Intelligence 51, no. 2 

(2007): 59–69. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Leidesdorf, Titus. “The Vietnamese as Operational 

Target.” Studies in Intelligence 12, no. 4 (1968): 57–71. 

Originally SECRET—Released in full.

Linder, James C. “The Fall of Lima Site 85.” Studies 

in Intelligence 38, no. 4 (1994): 43–52. Originally 

UNCLASSIFIED. Reprinted with updating editor’s note 

and new afterword in Studies in Intelligence 59, no. 1 

(March 2015).

Mark, David. “The Mayaguez Rescue Operation 

Revisited.” Studies in Intelligence 23, no. 2 (1979): 

29–32. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in full.

Maximov, William J. and Edward Scrutchings. “The Metal 

Traces Test.” Studies in Intelligence 11, no. 4 (1967): 

37–44. Originally CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN—Released 

in full.

Peterson, Gordon I. and David C. Taylor. “A Shield and 

Sword: Intelligence Support to Communications with 

US POWs in Vietnam,” Studies in Intelligence 60, no. 1 

(2016): 1–16. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Pribbenow, Merle L. “The Man in the Snow White 

Cell.” Studies in Intelligence 48, no. 1 (2004): 59–69. 

Originally UNCLASSIFIED.
21

Part I: Historical Overviews

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Mrs. and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in 1967 deplaning from an Air 

America aircraft to visit the US mission in Vung Tau in the southern 

portion of South Vietnam. CIA file photo.

Helio-Courier on the ground in Laos. The aircraft was better suited 

to mountain flying than helicopters, but it was demanding to fly. CIA 

file photo.
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 22

Part I: Historical Overviews

From Thomas L Ahern, Jr., Undercover Armies: CIA and Surrogate Warfare 

in Laos (Center for the Studiy of Intelligence, 2006). Originally classified, 

the book was declassified in large part and released in 2009. See cia.gov 

Freedom of Information Act Reading Room.

MPG 58625AI 3-68
23

Part I: Historical Overviews

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Meanwhile, CIA in Laos, 1954–74

Throughout the Vietnam War, CIA played a major role 

in a related conflict in Laos. The US can date its initial 

involvement in Laos to mid-1954, but its large-scale 

covert action effort began in 1960. The effort primarily 

involved support to the Laotian government and the 

organization of paramilitary units among the Hmong 

hill peoples. The Hmong were rural slash-and-burn 

subsistence farmers who had supported the French 

throughout the colonial period. They had fought the 

Japanese during World War II, and they despised the Viet 

Minh after the war. 

CIA support to Laos began with financial aid given 

between 1954 and 1959 to a rightwing general named 

Phoumi Nousavan, who took control of the government 

after the 1954 Geneva Conference granted independence 

to Laos (and divided Vietnam). Nevertheless, by 1960, 

opposition to Nousavan had grown. Souvanna Phouma, a 

neutralist, and Souphanouvong, a communist, combined 

their forces against Nousavan. 

President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “We cannot let 

Laos fall to the communists even if we have to fight.” 

But Nousavan remained too weak and unpopular to save. 

Although 5,000 US troops were in nearby Thailand in 

1960, President John F. Kennedy chose a diplomatic 

solution rather than risk a military conflict in Laos.

In May 1961, during a conference in Geneva, US 

Ambassador W. Averill Harriman arranged an agreement 

creating a neutral Laos, with Souvanna Phouma at 

the head of a coalition government that included 

Souphaouvong and the communist Pathet Lao. The 

agreement also called for the removal of all foreign forces 

from Laos, reflecting President Kennedy’s view that Laos 

was remote and not vital to US interests.

Language of the agreement also called for the removal 

of North Vietnamese forces, which were then moving 

personnel and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into 

South Vietnam. Although the United States withdrew its 

military forces from Laos, establishing a demilitarized 

zone, the North Vietnamese did not because Laos 

remained vital as an infiltration route into South Vietnam. 

The Objective: Interdiction Along the 

Ho Chi Minh Trail

Eventually, US leaders began to see that the interdiction 

of communist men and supplies on this route was 

essential to a growing effort to stabilize South Vietnam. 

Therefore, CIA began a covert effort to harass the North 

Vietnamese with the assistance of the Hmong and 

Laotians. They replaced the overt presence of US Special 

Forces who had previously performed the same mission 

and added interdiction and intelligence collection to 

harassment operations.

CIA also recognized early that while it could cause 

problems for the North Vietnamese on the Ho Chi Minh 

Trail in Laos, it could not eradicate the communist 

influence in the country. At the same time, the North 

Vietnamese goal was limited to keeping the Ho Chi Minh 

Trail open. As a result of this curious confluence of 

Header photo: Hmong paramilitary operations in Laos 

were led and supplied from Long Tieng, which grew during 

the conflict from a barely inhabited village in 1961 to a 

population center of nearly 30,000 people. CIA file photo.
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 24

Part I: Historical Overviews

Meanwhile, CIA in Laos, 1954–74

interests, CIA paramilitary officers would wage a classic 

low-intensity conflict aimed at the North Vietnamese that 

neither side wanted to escalate. 

Eventually, CIA led an army of about 40,000 Hmong 

fighters under General Vang Pao. This low-level war 

succeeded in harassing the North Vietnamese on the Ho 

Chi Minh Trail, but declining morale among the Hmong 

coincided with increased communist activities in Laos 

after 1968, when North Vietnamese Army forces took 

on a more direct military role in South Vietnam after the 

Tet offensive.

Air America’s Role

CIA also focused on supplying the Hmong and other 

anti-communist forces with food, medicine, and military 

aid delivered by the proprietary airline Air America. 

Founded in 1958, Air America eventually consisted of a 

fleet of 30 helicopters, 24 twin-engine transports, and 

two dozen short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft. The aircraft 

operated from sites in the interior of Laos and in northern 

Thailand. Air America inserted and extracted road watch 

teams and flew night airdrop missions of personnel, 

supplies, and sensors over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It also 

performed search-and-rescue missions to retrieve downed 

US fliers. Additionally, Air America pilots conducted some 

highly successful photoreconnaissance missions over 

North Vietnam and Laos. During this period, Air America 

made possible numerous clandestine missions conducted 

by US Special Forces.

The Beginning of the End

A February 1974 cease-fire agreement led to the 

formation of a new coalition government in Laos that 

involved both the US-backed royalist government and 

the North Vietnamese–backed Pathet Lao. It proved to 

be a short-lived peace. In 1975 after the fall of South 

Vietnam and Cambodia, the Laotian communists pushed 

the Royalists out of power and seized the government. 

The Hmong continued fighting well into 1975, but they 

did so without the support of the United States, which 

had ended its commitment to Southeast Asia. During the 

Laotian war, about 17,000 tribesmen died. Ninety-seven 

Air America pilots and crewmembers also lost their lives. 

The last Air America aircraft and the last CIA officers left 

Laos in June 1974.

Studies Selections:

Absher, Kenneth Michael. “John Kearns and the Cold 

War in Laos.” Studies in Intelligence 46, no. 4 (2002): 

45–54. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in part.

Castle, Timothy. “From the Bay of Pigs to Laos—

Operation MILLPOND: The Beginning of a Distant Covert 

War.” Studies in Intelligence 59, no. 2 (2015): 1–16. 

Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Holm, Richard L. “Recollections of a Case Officer in 

Laos, 1962–1964.” Studies in Intelligence 47, no. 1 

(2003): 1–17. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Leary, William M. “CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955–

1974.” Studies in Intelligence 42, no. 2 (1998): 71–86. 

Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

McCann, Frederic. “Gathering Intelligence in Laos in 

1968.” Studies in Intelligence 49, no. 1 (2005): 27–31. 

Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Petchell, Robert A. “Cash on Delivery.” Studies in 

Intelligence 17, no. 3 (1973): 1–7. Originally SECRET—

Released in part.

Stockinger, Edwin K. “Five Weeks at Phalane.” Studies in 

Intelligence 17, no. 1 (1973): 11–19. Originally SECRET//

NOFORN—Released in part.
25

Part I: Historical Overviews

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Map showing locations of planned interdiction efforts along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1970. Map 

from Thomas L. Ahern, Jr., Undercover Armies: CIA and Surrogate Warfare in Laos.
CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 26

Part I: Historical Overviews

Above photo: A Hmong village 

ca. 1964. CIA officers leading the 

Hmong army saw helping their 

people preserve their ways of life 

as part of the covert project. CIA 

file photo.

Left photo: A Hmong soldier in an 

undated CIA photo heads home, 

chicken in hand. The evacuation 

from Laos of Hmong fighters after 

1975 posed serious challenges 

for CIA and other US government 

agencies. CIA file photo.
27

Part I: Historical Overviews

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Postwar Reflections

The Southeast Asian conflict gave birth to an enormous 

literature reflecting on the conflict’s aim and purposes 

and detailing through memoir and historical research the 

military and diplomatic actions of all sides. Inevitably, 

discussion of lessons of the era would find their way into 

the pages of Studies. A few, the earliest or those written 

by important players of the period, reflecting mainly on 

leadership and overall Intelligence Community analysis, 

are included in this collection. 

Studies Selections:

Allen, George W. “Intelligence in Small Wars.” Studies 

in Intelligence 35, no. 4 (1991): 19–27. Originally 

UNCLASSIFIED.

Bunker, Ellsworth. “Vietnam in Retrospect.” Studies 

in Intelligence 18, no. 1 (1974): 41–47. Originally 

CONFIDENTIAL—Released in full. 

Ford, Harold P. “Thoughts Engendered by Robert 

McNamara’s ‘In Retrospect.’” Studies in Intelligence 39, 

no. 1 (1995): 95–109. Originally UNCLASSIFIED. 

———, “Why CIA Analysts Were So Doubtful About 

Vietnam.” Studies in Intelligence 40, no. 2 (1996): 

43–53. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

———, “William Colby: Retrospect.” Studies in 

Intelligence 40, no. 1 (1996): 1–5. Originally 

UNCLASSIFIED. 

Hathaway, Robert M. “Richard Helms as DCI.” Studies 

in Intelligence 37, no. 4 (1993): 33–40. Originally 

SECRET—Released in full.

Laurie, Clayton. “Intelligence in Public Literature, 

Takes on Intelligence and the Vietnam War,” Studies 

in Intelligence 55, no. 2 (2011): 73–77. Originally 

UNCLASSIFIED.

Lewis, Anthony Marc. “Re-examining Our Perceptions on 

Vietnam.” Studies in Intelligence 17, no. 4 (1973): 1–62. 

Original SECRET—Released in full.

Header photo: US civilians being evacuated from Saigon in 

April 1975. DOD photo.

29 CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Annotated Selections

The annotations to articles below are arranged according to the sections of the 

historical overview in which the articles were initially cited. While the articles cited in 

Part I are shown within each section in formal bibliographic style (by author name), 

those annotated below were curated to track roughly chronologically with historical 

events as they unfolded (rather than by author name or publication date). Each article 

is hyperlinked to a PDF in the web. The PDFs are located in the public website of 

CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence.

Indochina–In Support of a Colonial Power, 1945–54

Swift, Carleton A., Richard D. Kovar, and Russell J. Bowen. “Intelligence in Recent 

Public Literature: Why Vietnam? Prelude to America’s Albatross.” Studies in 

Intelligence 25, no. 2 (1981): 99–116. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

While President Harry Truman may very well have shared many of President Franklin 

Roosevelt’s perceptions and beliefs, the need to include France as a member of NATO 

and the Cold War alliance against the Soviet Union muted any qualms he or American 

critics may have had about supporting a French return to their former colony after 

it was liberated from the Japanese. With the outbreak of the first Indochina War in 

1946—and through the French defeat and withdrawal in 1954—few questioned the 

need for ever increasing amounts of economic, military, diplomatic, and intelligence 

aid to the French in Indochina. One who did so, though belatedly in public, was the 

OSS officer who first met Ho Chi Minh, Archimedes Patti. The title of his memoir of 

OSS service in Indochina at the end of WWII and in months after spoke loudly to that 

doubt. This collection of reviews published in Studies in 1981 includes the work of 

two reviewers who were participants in the evolution of CIA involvement in Southeast 

Asia. One, Carleton Swift, replaced Patti as chief of Hanoi Station. Both bring in 

personal experience and perspective.

LePage, Jean-Marc and Elie Tenenbaum. “French and American Intelligence 

Relations During the First Indochina War, 1950–1954.” Studies in Intelligence 55, 

no. 3 (2011): 19–27. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

As French scholars Jean-Marc LePage and Elie Tenenbaum recount, relationships 

between French intelligence and security organizations operating in Indochina with the 

CIA mirrored patterns and behaviors seen elsewhere from the top policy levels in the 

French, Vietnamese, and US capitals to the Southeast Asian battlefields. Periods of 

intelligence cooperation and sharing alternated with times of estrangement, exclusion, 

and secrecy on both sides.

Part II: Annotated Selections
Part II: Annotated Selections

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 30

The Republic of Vietnam, Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954–65

Palmer, Gen. Bruce. “US Intelligence and Vietnam.” Studies in Intelligence 28, no. 5 

(Special Issue, 1984). Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in part.

West Point graduate, career US Army officer, with distinguished service during World 

War II, in Korea and in the Dominican Republic, Gen. Bruce Palmer, Jr., commanded 

II Field Force in Vietnam, beginning in 1966. He served from May 1967 to August 

1968 as the deputy commanding general of the US Army–Vietnam. Several years 

after Palmer’s military retirement in August 1974, DCI Stansfield Turner appointed 

Palmer to a position on the Central Intelligence Agency Senior Review Panel, on 

which the general served for five years. Possessing in-depth knowledge of military 

and intelligence affairs, Palmer was asked in 1982 by CSI and by the Directorate 

of Intelligence to study CIA intelligence products relating to the Vietnam conflict. 

Palmer’s originally classified study appeared in 1984 and remains one of the best 

and most comprehensive works on the Agency’s intelligence collection and analytical 

roles in Vietnam. Intended as an in-house teaching tool for training future intelligence 

analysts, Palmer’s study neither glorifies CIA successes nor covers up its failures. 

Ahern, Thomas L. Jr. “The CIA and the Government of Ngo Dinh Diem.” Studies in 

Intelligence 37, no. 4 (1993): 41–51. Originally SECRET—Released in part. 

A noncommunist alternative to Ho Chi Minh did exist in Ngo Dinh Diem, a nationalist, 

Western-educated Catholic previously designated by the French as the prime minister 

of Vietnam under Emperor Bao Dai. Diem, however, did not possess Ho’s charisma 

or popularity, and in 1954, Diem did not effectively control even southern Vietnam, 

let alone any territory or significant population north of the 17th Parallel. In order to 

stabilize Diem’s fledgling government—a government that faced myriad rivals and 

contenders from French-backed generals, religious sects, and local warlords—the 

Eisenhower administration called on the CIA. As CIA Historian Thomas Ahern notes, 

“The same combination of goal-oriented action and intellectual objectivity that 

CIA officers brought to bear” in this case, “also produced pioneering work on the 

operational concepts and techniques of interagency coordination that later defined 

the American counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam.” Ahern would build on this early 

work to publish within CIA four book-length histories of US engagement in Southeast 

Asia. These and two other monographs were redacted and released in 2009. They are 

available in the Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room of www.cia.gov 

under the headings Historical Collections/Vietnam Histories. Future mentions of this 

work will simply refer to “Ahern Vietnam Histories.”

Allen, George W. “Covering Coups in Saigon.” Studies in Intelligence 33, no. 4 

(1989): 57–61. Originally SECRET—Released in part.

Despite US efforts at nation-building and political stabilization, embattled and 

deteriorating South Vietnamese regimes experienced more than a dozen coups, 

leadership reshuffles, and other crises in just over a five-year period beginning in late 

1960. The coup that toppled Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963 and led to his death 

and that of his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, began a series of revolving-door governments 
Part II: Annotated Selections

31 CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

The Republic of Vietnam, Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954–65

composed of military strongmen and weak civilian politicians during the next four 

years, just as CIA analysts and DCI John McCone had predicted. Through it all, the 

CIA’s Saigon Station, staffed with analysts and operations officers, kept policymakers 

in Washington, DC, and in the US Country Team at the Saigon embassy abreast of 

political and military developments as they occurred, providing a continuous, accurate, 

and comprehensive picture of events on the ground.

Hartness, William M. “Aspects of Counterinsurgency Intelligence.” Studies in 

Intelligence 7, no. 4 (1963): 71–83. Originally CONFIDENTIAL—Released in full and 

reprinted in Studies in Intelligence 58, no. 4 (2015).

In a US military establishment just beginning to recognize the requirements for 

fighting low-intensity conflicts, US Army Lt. Col. William M. Hartness identified in 

this 1963 article the importance of intelligence, especially before the advent of any 

conflict or operation. He encouraged Area Studies, or basic surveys of the operational 

areas—geography, sociocultural, political, economic, and military—long before 

intervention. Once aware of the environment, this assessment would serve as the basis 

for counterinsurgency operational planning to include preventive, reactive, aggressive, 

and remedial measures. While sound in concept, there is little evidence indicating 

that MACV acted upon these suggestions at the time or after the commitment of US 

ground forces to Vietnam in March 1965.

Matthias, Willard C. “How Three Estimates Went Wrong.” Studies in Intelligence 12, 

no. 1 (1968): 27–38. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in part.

Collecting and analyzing intelligence to provide the most accurate independent 

assessments of the world situation in the form of National Intelligence 

Estimates (NIEs) to the president and policymaker is a primary CIA mission. The CIA’s 

Board of National Estimates, created in 1950, held responsibility for this important 

function during the Vietnam War era and worked with more than 11 other Defense and 

Intelligence Community members of the United States Intelligence Board (USIB) to 

produce coordinated findings. As a CIA board member, Willard C. Matthias explains 

that this process could often produce significant changes in the substance, tone, and 

conclusions of any given initial estimate, resulting in the delivery of an intelligence 

viewpoint contrary to the reality on the ground or what the CIA Estimates Staff and 

Board may have originally intended. Only one of the three estimates addressed in 

this article dealt with Vietnam—Prospects in South Vietnam, NIE 53-63, 17 April 

1963. This estimate and a multitude of others are reproduced in Estimative Products 

on Vietnam, 1948–1975. The collection was produced by the National Intelligence 

Council in April 2005. Like the Ahern Vietnam Histories, it is available in the CIA’s 

public, Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room under the headings 

Historical Collections/NIC Vietnam Collection.

Schiattareggia, M. H. “Counterintelligence in Counter-Guerrilla Operations.” Studies 

in Intelligence 6, no. 3 (1962): 1–24. Originally SECRET—Released in full and 

reprinted in Studies in Intelligence 57, No. 2 (June 2013): 39–63.
Part II: Annotated Selections

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 32

The Republic of Vietnam, Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954–65

By the end of 1962, the Kennedy administration had committed more than 11,000 

military advisers to training and assisting the military and police forces of the Republic 

of South Vietnam. The CIA had also committed several score officers to raising, 

training, and directing rural militia units in antiguerrilla warfare, most successfully 

in Vietnam’s central highlands. US forces would find a different type of conflict 

than anything they had seen before. To US military leaders, accustomed to largescale conventional conflicts, counterguerrilla warfare, low intensity conflict, and 

counterinsurgency as it developed in Southeast Asia was relatively new. Schiattareggia 

surveys the classics of guerrilla warfare literature produced by its most famous 

theorists to that time, those who would become household names to Americans during 

the war. Knowing how one’s adversaries think and operate, the author maintains, is 

the first step toward defeating them. 

Schwarzchild, Edward T. “The Assessment of Insurgency.” Studies in Intelligence 7, 

no. 4 (1963): 85–89. Originally SECRET—Released in full.

Making sense of the overwhelming amount of raw data collected on any given issue 

and then determining what is most useful to the commander or policymaker is one of 

the intelligence analysts’ most central and daunting tasks. Edward T. Schwarzchild, 

writing in the fall of 1963, describes the difficulties of those collecting increasing 

amounts of information about the growing insurgency in South Vietnam. Schwarzchild 

stressed, “Counterinsurgency is extraordinary, posing intelligence problems too large, 

too complicated, too detailed, and too fast-moving to be handled by procedures 

designed for other times and other information.”

Smith, Russell Jack. “Intelligence Production During the Helms Regime.” Studies in 

Intelligence 39, no. 4 (1995): 93–102. Originally SECRET—Released in part.

During Richard Helms’s tenure as DCI, analytical reporting to the president 

had matured and regularized, reaching the White House in the form of National 

Intelligence Estimates and in the various publications of the Directorate of 

Intelligence, including memoranda and the President’s Daily Brief. The NIEs had 

become a routine series, broad in scope, although they could deal with short-term or 

contingency matters. DI memoranda tended to deal with analysis of long-range trends. 

As Russell Jack Smith, the deputy director of intelligence during this time wrote, 

Helms took an active interest in the quality and timeliness of NIEs and other reporting 

that appeared at the White House, at NSC meetings, and on the desk of Secretary of 

Defense Robert S. McNamara and others at the Pentagon.

Steinmeyer, Walter. “The Intelligence Role in Counterinsurgency.” Studies in 

Intelligence 9, no. 4 (1965): 57–63. Originally SECRET—Released in full and 

reprinted in Studies in Intelligence 59, no. 4 (December 2015).

In January 1961, Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev 

promised the full cooperation and support of the communist USSR to worldwide 

“wars of national liberation,” defined as “struggles by all colonies and dependent 

countries against international imperialism” and as “uprisings against rotten 

reactionary regimes.” In practice, however, as Walter Steinmeyer—the penname of 
Part II: Annotated Selections

33 CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

The Republic of Vietnam, Insurgency and Nation-Building, 1954–65

senior Directorate of Operations officer Theodore Shackley—wrote, the Soviets and 

their communist Chinese and Cuban allies sought to “exploit for their own purposes 

dissension, turmoil, and impatience for reform in Latin America, Africa, the Near 

East, and Southeast Asia,” through aggression against fledgling or weak democracies, 

recently independent former colonies, or economically depressed areas aligned with 

the United States. The greatest national security challenge facing the United States in 

this era of nuclear stalemate, Steinmeyer thus asserted, was of confronting communist 

subversion and totalitarianism hiding behind the guise of benevolent “national 

liberation” movements.

The War “Goes Big,” 1965–75

Ford, Harold P. “The US Decision to Go Big in Vietnam.” Studies in Intelligence 29, 

no. 1 (1985): 1–15. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in full.

In the crucial years of 1962 to 1965, CIA’s Harold Ford, who served as chief of the 

Far East Staff, and then as the chief, Estimates Staff, Office of National Estimates, 

held a direct advisory role in relation to US policymakers grappling with the growing 

communist insurgency in South Vietnam. In the aftermath of the coup against 

Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963, the situation in South Vietnam grew ever 

more precarious, prompting those within the Johnson administration to consider a 

larger military commitment and expansion of the war to North Vietnam, then seen 

as the source of the conflict. In this article, Ford describes CIA involvement with 

policymakers debating whether to “go big” in Vietnam in 1964 and 1965 by bombing 

North Vietnam and dispatching sizable ground forces and what impact intelligence 

assessments did, or did not have, on those decisions. Ford explored these themes in 

greater detail in CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962–1968,

which was published by CSI in 1998. The complete work is available on CSI’s page 

in www.cia.gov.

Atkins, Merle, Kenneth C. Fuller, and Bruce Smith. “‘Rolling Thunder’ and Bomb 

Damage to Bridges.” Studies in Intelligence 13, no. 4 (1969): 1–9. Originally 

SECRET//NOFORN—Released in full.

Once the Johnson administration made the decision to “go big” in Vietnam, the 

Rolling Thunder bombing campaign of North Vietnam proved a major component 

of the new effort. Based on the erroneous policy assessment that military pressure 

on North Vietnam in the form of a gradually escalating, yet restrained, air campaign 

would convince communist leaders to end assistance to the insurgency in the South 

and negotiate a settlement, the air war began on 2 March 1965. During the next three 

years in an on-again, off-again fashion, air units from three services pounded portions 

of North Vietnam’s scant transportation and industrial infrastructure. As Atkins, 

Fuller, and Smith recount, “As the days of the air campaign over North Vietnam 

stretched into months, the requirement developed in Washington and particularly 

the White House for independent assessments of the results.” CIA analysts teamed 

up with analysts from the three-year-old Defense Intelligence Agency to produce 

coordinated assessments.
Part II: Annotated Selections

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 34

The War “Goes Big,” 1965–75

Hall, Arthur B. “Landscape Analysis.” Studies in Intelligence 11, no. 3 (1967): 

65–75. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in full.

Intelligence comes in many shapes and forms. During the Vietnam era, CIA collected 

geographic intelligence, not as an exercise to create cartographic products, although 

the Agency did have such a branch, but to “analyze the distribution of things on the 

earth’s surface as they relate to the formulation and execution of US policy.” As Arthur 

Hall relates, initially the geographic intelligence or landscape analysis developed 

within CIA made major contributions to bombing and interdiction campaigns along the 

Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia. In this context, he noted, the geographic 

analyst could determine vulnerable points in the transportation network and the most 

effective bombing points. 

Puchalla, Edward F. “Communist Defense Against Aerial Surveillance in Southeast 

Asia.” Studies in Intelligence 14, no. 2 (1970): 31–78. Originally SECRET//

NOFORN—Released in full.

Most every intelligence or military innovation developed in wartime will typically 

provide only temporary advantage as adversaries devise countermeasures, if not leap 

ahead with innovations of their own. Edward F. Puchalla wrote of this concept in 

the context of the Rolling Thunder and air interdiction campaigns conducted by the 

United States in North and South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos between 1964 and 

1968. The communists, especially in North Vietnam, sought to lessen the impact 

of the bombing through ever more sophisticated and clever concealments, decoys, 

dispersions, and deceptions. 

Sinclair, Robert, “One Intelligence Analyst Remembers Another: A Review of Who the 

Hell Are We Fighting? The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars.”

Studies in Intelligence 50, No. 4 (2006): 1–9. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Robert Sinclair, himself a CIA analyst with Sam Adams during the Vietnam War, used 

his review of Michael Hiam’s 2006 biography of Adams to detail the challenges of 

presenting and defending CIA’s unpopular estimates of North Vietnamese and Viet 

Cong strengths in the face of the countervailing views of the Department of Defense 

and the US military hierarchy. A good many analysts in CIA and the military agreed 

that official military estimates were too low, but only Sam Adams kept fighting after 

1967, when the issue was defined away in the key National Intelligence Estimate 

discussed above. In the review, Sinclair goes on to reflect on the lessons for analysts 

in the pressurized environment of the time.

Kitchens, Allen H. “Crisis and Intelligence: Two Case Studies [Tet and Iran].” Studies 

in Intelligence 28, No. 3 (1984): 71–78. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

The communist Tet offensive in January 1968 proved a turning point in the Vietnam 

War. Although a stunning military defeat for North Vietnam and their southern Viet 

Cong allies, it proved a psychological victory because of the very recent optimistic 

public predictions of an impending US victory that had been made by the Johnson 

administration. In the immediate aftermath of the offensive, military leaders in South 

Vietnam and policymakers in Washington drew the ire of antiwar critics. In turn, the 
Part II: Annotated Selections

35 CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

The War “Goes Big,” 1965–75

CIA drew criticism for an alleged intelligence failure, neglecting to provide timely 

and actionable indications and warning. In the case of Tet, the intelligence remained 

fragmentary, policymakers and commanders “had been lulled into a false sense of 

security,” and most anticipated that any offensive would “follow traditional lines.” 

Tidwell, William A. “A New Kind of Air Targeting.” Studies in Intelligence 11, no. 1 

(1967): 55–60. Originally CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN—Released in full.

Since its founding, the primary mission of the Central Intelligence Agency has been 

collecting information on real and potential adversaries’ motivations, plans, and 

intentions and then producing analyzed, actionable intelligence for the policymaker 

and warfighter. Although providing intelligence in support of the military did not figure 

prominently in the CIA’s chartering documents, the CIA did come to provide increased 

assistance in theory and in fact during the wars in Southeast Asia. In this article, 

William Tidwell describes how intelligence can prove invaluable in targeting and 

destroying an insurgency in its early stages. 

As the Big War Rages, CIA Works at the Insurgency/Hamlet Level

Finlayson, Andrew R. “The Tay Ninh Provincial Reconnaissance Unit and Its Role in 

the Phoenix Program, 1969–70.” Studies in Intelligence 51, no. 2 (2007): 59–69. 

Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

As retired US Marine Col. Andrew Finlayson writes, “The Phoenix Program is arguably 

the most misunderstood and controversial program undertaken by the governments of 

the United States and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.” Antiwar critics at the 

time, and numbers of historians since, portray the program that aimed to eradicate 

the communist parallel government in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong 

Infrastructure, as an “unlawful and immoral assassination program targeting civilians.” 

As the author describes, however, the Phoenix Program was an intelligence collection 

program, one that CIA had worked to develop and implement for many years in 

cooperation with the South Vietnamese government that sought to identify Viet Cong 

cadre and rank-and-file fighters with the goal of removing them from the fight through 

persuasion or capture.

Elkes, Martin C. “The LAMS Story.” Studies in Intelligence 19, no. 2 (1975): 29–34. 

Originally SECRET—Released in part.

Intelligence officers often require specialized equipment that must be purpose-built. 

In other cases, however, existing technology can be adapted for intelligence use. 

During the wars in Southeast Asia, CIA officers needed low-cost and accurate position 

locating, communications, and navigation gear capable of working at multiple altitudes 

on land and at sea in varying terrain, climate, and weather conditions. In 1967, 

representatives from several CIA offices, including the Office of the Special Assistant 

for Vietnamese Affairs (SAVA), the Special Operations Division (SOD), the Technical 

Services Division (TSD), and the Office of Research and Development (ORD), 

developed requirements for a device meeting Agency needs. Based on the US Air 
Part II: Annotated Selections

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 36

As the Big War Rages, CIA Works at the Insurgency/Hamlet Level

Force Long Range Navigation, or LORAN, the system adapted for use became known 

as the LAMS, or LORAN Airborne Modular System.

Leidesdorf, Titus. “The Vietnamese as Operational Target.” Studies in Intelligence 12, 

no. 4 (1968): 57–71. Originally SECRET—Released in full.

From statesmen, to soldiers, to intelligence officers, Americans often displayed, and 

often noted, their lack of in-depth knowledge of Vietnam, its culture and history, 

and especially understanding of its people—peasants or elites, military or political 

leaders, in either the North or the South. Psychologist Titus Leidesdorf rejected this 

idea of the inscrutable Vietnamese, who “project the image of a homogenous people, 

proud of their heritage and their ethnic superiority and . . . sense of unbroachable 

[sic] unity.” He noted they were actually quite the opposite and as a people they 

were extraordinarily diverse and could be classified into a variety of regional, social, 

political, class and ideological groupings, adhering to various organizational and 

ideological behaviors, all discernable and ultimately exploitable.

Linder, James C. “The Fall of Lima Site 85.” Studies in Intelligence 38, no. 4 (1994): 

43–52. Originally UNCLASSIFIED. Reprinted with updating editor’s note and new 

afterword in Studies in Intelligence 59, no. 1 (March 2015).

James C. Linder provides one of the earliest public accounts given of the successful 

North Vietnamese attack in early 1968 on Lima Site 85, a remote mountaintop US 

installation near the Laotian–North Vietnamese border. By 1965, US policy in Laos 

had evolved into a covert war waged by CIA against the communist Pathet Lao and 

their North Vietnamese allies, who used the nearby Ho Chi Minh Trail to transport men 

and supplies to the war in South Vietnam. Lima Site 85 was built in August 1966 

on a 5,600-foot-tall mountain named Phou Phathi, 100 miles south of Dien Bien 

Phu. It served as a Tactical Air Navigation (TACAN) station to support the growing air 

interdiction campaign in Laos and the bombing campaign in North Vietnam. The site 

was operated by US Air Force and Lockheed Corporation technicians and supplied 

by frequent Air America flights from Udorn, Thailand. Lima 85 had also served as a 

CIA paramilitary base for Hmong fighters operating in the region. The site served vital 

tactical and strategic functions in US air operations against North Vietnamese targets, 

itself becoming a target for urgent North Vietnamese action.

Maximov, William J. and Edward Scrutchings. “The Metal Traces Test.” Studies in 

Intelligence 11, no. 4 (1967): 37–44. Originally CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN–Released 

in full.

DS&T chemists, scientists, technicians, engineers, and craftsmen worked in close 

cooperation with the Technical Services Division (TSD) of CIA’s operations directorate 

to develop all manner of paraphernalia for use by those dealing in espionage or 

paramilitary activities, much as their predecessors had done in the World War II 

Office of Strategic Services. By the mid-1960s, the DS&T not only created purposebuilt specialized equipment, but also designed, built, and deployed a growing array 

of ground, aerial, and space-based technical collection systems. While many S&T 

products and inventions had possible military uses, it was not until the Vietnam 
Part II: Annotated Selections

37 CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

As the Big War Rages, CIA Works at the Insurgency/Hamlet Level

War that the CIA began to provide specialized technology to the military. One such 

example, the trace metal detection test, and its later iteration detecting explosives use 

or “gunshot residue,” are readily recognizable by any American who has ever watched 

a crime drama or police show on television.

Peterson, Gordon I. and David C. Taylor. “A Shield and Sword: Intelligence Support 

to Communications with US POWs in Vietnam.” Studies in Intelligence 60, no. 1 

(2016): 1–16. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Another example of CIA technical support to the military was institution of a program 

of secret communications between Washington and US prisoners of war held in North 

Vietnam. Composed of secret writing techniques developed years before, the system 

was devised and carried out at the request of the US military by a single CIA officer, 

who often worked after normal working hours to perfect secret messages for delivery 

to prisoners with mail privileges. The system gave Washington information about POW 

identities, prison conditions, and even escape plans.

Pribbenow, Merle L. “The Man in the Snow White Cell.” Studies in Intelligence 48, 

no. 1 (2004): 59–69. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Retired CIA officer Merle Pribbenow supervised Vietnamese language translation 

services at Saigon Station during the later years of the Vietnam War. Decades 

later, during the early post-9/11 years when CIA officers first began to interrogate 

recalcitrant al-Qa‘ida members, he recalled similar difficulties when trying to obtain 

information from communist adversaries. Pribbenow cites the case of Nguyen Tai, 

“who turned out to be the most senior North Vietnamese officer ever captured during 

the Vietnam War,” who “resisted years of unrelenting interrogation by some of the 

CIA’s most skilled, and South Vietnam’s most brutal, interrogators.”

Mark, David. “The Mayaguez Rescue Operation Revisited.” Studies in Intelligence 23, 

no. 2 (1979): 29–32. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in full.

On 12 May 1975, members of the communist Khmer Rouge seized the US merchant 

ship Mayaguez in the Gulf of Siam off Cambodia, taking the 39 crewmembers to the 

small Koh Tang Island, 34 miles south of Kompong Som. When efforts to negotiate 

the release of the crew failed, President Gerald R. Ford determined that a rescue 

attempt by US Marines stationed in the Pacific was the only option to prevent 

movement of the hostages to the mainland and an uncertain fate. When military 

planners approached the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) 

for information to assist the rescuers, NPIC turned to another small CIA office, the 

Domestic Collection Division (DCD). DCD maintained “extensive contacts with US 

oil companies” that possessed the most up-to-date charts, maps, and photographs 

obtained from petroleum exploration activities, as well as field representatives and 

engineers. As Mark notes, “a major part of the basic intelligence on which the action 

rested was provided” by this small office.
Part II: Annotated Selections

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 38

Meanwhile, CIA in Laos, 1954–74

Leary, William M. “CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955–1974.” Studies in Intelligence

42, no. 2 (1998): 71–86. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

CIA operations in Laos between 1955 and 1974 represented CIA’s largest paramilitary 

operation during the Vietnam War era. The United States first began economic and 

military aid to the Royal Lao Government in Vientiane in 1950 and then established 

the United States Operations Mission (USOM) five years later, after the Geneva 

Conference of 1954 neutralized Laos upon the withdrawal of the French from 

Indochina. CIA officers belonged to USOM, which, in turn, drew support throughout 

Laos after 1957 by the CIA’s proprietary airline, Civil Air Transport, acquired in 1950. 

CAT supported covert operations throughout Asia, while ostensibly operating as a 

typical East Asian commercial airline providing regularly scheduled passenger and 

freight services. It was renamed Air America in March 1959. Historian William Leary 

recounts the origins and evolution of the airline in Laos. In the process, he provides an 

excellent, detailed account of the evolution of CIA’s secret war against North Vietnam 

and the indigenous communist Pathet Lao along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the eastern 

portion of the country.

Castle, Timothy. “From the Bay of Pigs to Laos—Operation MILLPOND: The 

Beginning of a Distant Covert War.” Studies in Intelligence 59, no. 2 (2015): 1–16. 

Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

In this essay, Timothy N. Castle, an Air Force combat veteran of the Vietnam War 

turned historian of the wars in Southeast Asia, reflects on the international activism 

of the John F. Kennedy administration, which simultaneously took on covert military 

interventions in Cuba and Laos only months after Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961. 

As the well-known Bay of Pigs operation was under way in April 1961, so too was a 

joint CIA-Pentagon plan to bomb a communist supply station in Laos. As the assault 

on Cuba faltered, the Laos airstrikes were canceled just four hours before they were to 

be launched. Nonetheless, and perhaps unintentionally, the presidentially authorized 

preparations for Operation MILLPOND became the taproot for what eventually 

emerged, in one veteran’s words, as the “largest, most innovative program of irregular 

warfare ever conducted by CIA.”

Holm, Richard L. “Recollections of a Case Officer in Laos, 1962–1964.” Studies in 

Intelligence 47, no. 1 (2003): 1–17. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Richard L. Holm was among the first paramilitary officers to arrive in Laos in January 

1962, joining three other experienced officers with similar service elsewhere in Asia 

dating to the early 1950s. Charged with supporting the Royal Lao Army in its fight 

against the communist Pathet Lao then supported by North Vietnam, CIA officers 

collaborated with US Agency for International Development workers assisting different 

tribal and ethnic groups. Holm and his colleagues focused on the ethnically distinct 

Hmong tribes of northern Laos, forming militia units and road-watch teams of 15 to 

100 members for collecting intelligence and contesting North Vietnamese use of the 

Ho Chi Minh Trail through eastern Laos to Cambodia and South Vietnam.
Part II: Annotated Selections

39 CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Meanwhile, CIA in Laos, 1954–74

McCann, Frederic. “Gathering Intelligence in Laos in 1968.” Studies in Intelligence

49, no. 1 (2005): 27–31. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Since 1947, human intelligence collection has been a core CIA mission, conducted 

worldwide by the officers of the Directorate of Operations during times of war and 

peace, wherever and whenever the president directs. Agency officer Fredric McCann 

performed this task in Laos in 1968, interviewing refugees and deserters from the 

communist Pathet Lao, collecting information that, once analyzed, would provide 

crucial intelligence to policymakers seeking to develop sound policies for Southeast 

Asia. McCann’s information would supplement collection already obtained through 

the paramilitary operations the CIA had initiated years before in the region, providing 

insights into the size, capabilities, and structure of those enemy forces facing CIA and 

its Laotian and Hmong allies.

Petchell, Robert A. “Cash on Delivery.” Studies in Intelligence 17, no. 3 (1973): 1–7. 

Originally SECRET—Released in part.

Laotian or Hmong road-watch teams and irregular units with CIA-developed aerial and 

ground technical collection systems provided vital insights on communist activities 

in Laos and the movement of troops and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail into 

South Vietnam. Often, however, weather, mechanical failure, or the unwillingness of 

the teams to get close to sizable enemy forces frustrated these collection attempts. 

North Vietnamese soldiers possessed much better and higher quality intelligence, if 

only they could be captured or convinced to surrender. One CIA operations officer, who 

worked with Hmong tribesmen organized into special Paramilitary Team Operations 

units in the southern Laotian Saravane Province and Bolovens Plateau areas, recalls 

his experiences there. Organized into well-armed groups of about 12 men, the teams 

worked in the field for two to three months at a time without close supervision, 

searching for solitary NVA soldiers to “snatch” for intelligence collection purposes.

Stockinger, Edwin K. “Five Weeks at Phalane.” Studies in Intelligence 17, no. 1 

(1973): 11–19. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in part.

The offensive by the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam (ARVN) into Laos in 

February and March 1971, named Operation Lam Son 719, had the twin objectives 

of cutting the Ho Chi Minh Trail at the vital Route 9 crossroads at Tchepone, while 

also demonstrating the success of the ongoing “Vietnamization” program aimed at 

turning the war over to South Vietnam as American troop withdrawals accelerated. 

South Vietnamese units numbering some 15,000 men initially made good progress 

against light opposition, but within two weeks, five North Vietnamese divisions totaling 

40,000 troops counterattacked, prompting a panicked ARVN retreat back into South 

Vietnam by the end of March. All sides claimed victory. The history books, however, 

often say little about the aftermath of Lam Son 719, especially as it played out in 

Laos. After repulsing the ARVN invasion, NVA units continued attacks to the west 

toward Savannaket on the Mekong River on the Thai-Laotian border with the goal 

of cutting the Laotian panhandle in two and permanently securing the Ho Chi Minh 
Part II: Annotated Selections

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 40

Meanwhile, CIA in Laos, 1954–74

Trail. In the path of this advance along Route 9 lay the village of Muang Phalane, a 

small district capital and market town that served as a forward operating base for two 

battalions of CIA-lead Lao paramilitary forces.

Absher, Kenneth Michael. “John Kearns and the Cold War in Laos.” Studies in 

Intelligence 46, no. 4 (2002): 45–54. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released 

in part.

Seventeen CIA officers and one member of the CIA’s predecessor organization—the 

Office of Strategic Services—lost their lives in service to the nation in the wars in 

Southeast Asia between September 1945 and July 1976. Told here is “the story of 

one of CIA’s silent heroes, honored by a star on the Memorial Wall,” operations officer 

John Kearns, killed in combat action against the North Vietnamese in December 

1972. Like many of his Directorate of Operations colleagues, Kearns served for several 

years in the US Army Special Forces in Vietnam before joining the CIA. In June 

1969, he arrived in Laos as a paramilitary operations officer to direct regular Lao 

forces, intelligence teams conducting harassing, and interdiction raids against North 

Vietnamese forces along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. When the communists launched their 

Easter Offensive in South Vietnam in March 1972, the interdiction and intelligence 

collection efforts of CIA officers in Laos grew in importance as ever-increasing 

numbers of communist troops and supplies moved down the Trail. Kearns suffered 

fatal wounds in a mortar attack near Pak Song on 15 December 1972. He was 

posthumously awarded the CIA Intelligence Star for his courage and sacrifice.

Postwar Reflections

Bunker, Ellsworth. “Vietnam in Retrospect.” Studies in Intelligence 18, no. 1 (1974): 

41–47. Originally CONFIDENTIAL—Released in full.

On 11 December 1973, former US Ambassador to South Vietnam Ellsworth Bunker 

delivered this address to the CIA workforce at its Langley, Virginia, headquarters. The 

last US military personnel had left South Vietnam the previous March, in keeping with 

the peace accords signed in Paris in January of that year. Yet as Bunker noted, the 

end of the conflict was still nowhere in sight, confiding that “the war’s fundamental 

issue remains unresolved.” Nonetheless, the ambassador took the occasion to 

highlight the contributions CIA had made during the conflict noting, “The role of the 

Agency in Vietnam was indispensable, both in waging the war and in the negotiations 

leading to a settlement.” 

Ford, Harold P. “Why CIA Analysts Were So Doubtful About Vietnam.” Studies in 

Intelligence 40, no. 2 (1996): 43–53. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

CIA analysts, as Harold Ford notes, had a well-documented and well-known reputation 

for skepticism concerning “official pronouncements about the Vietnam war” and 

consistently remained “fairly pessimistic about the outlook for ‘light at the end of 

the tunnel’.” While qualifying that not all analysts always thought alike, and that their 

views often differed from Agency operations officers in Southeast Asia who had mixed 
Part II: Annotated Selections

41 CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

views on the war, finished intelligence “maintained definitely pessimistic, skeptical 

tones over the years.” Concluding that “the war’s outcome justified many of the 

CIA’s analysts’ doubts and warnings,” it is less well known why such doubts existed, 

especially given the CIA’s central role in advising policymakers on how best to assist 

South Vietnam. 

Allen, George W. “Intelligence in Small Wars.” Studies in Intelligence 35, no. 4 

(1991): 19–27. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

George W. Allen served as an analyst during much of the Vietnam War in the United 

States and in Saigon. He noted in a 1991 address, “The American intelligence 

experience in Vietnam included its entire professional repertoire, some facets 

reasonably well performed, some embarrassingly flawed.” However controversial the 

war remained when Allen spoke 16 years after the fall of South Vietnam, he noted 

that the oft-spoken “credo ‘no more Vietnams’” reflected “wishful thinking.” The 

United States would face future Vietnams and when this inevitable happenstance 

occurred, he asserted, “Timely and comprehensive intelligence will be needed” lest 

“policymakers are handicapped” and “fail to act appropriately.” 

Ford, Harold P. “Thoughts Engendered by Robert McNamara’s ‘In Retrospect’.”

Studies in Intelligence 39, no. 1 (1995): 95–109. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

In 1995, 20 years after the fall of South Vietnam, former Secretary of Defense Robert 

S. McNamara (in office 1961–1968) published a memoir of his time in the Pentagon 

under Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson entitled In Retrospect: The 

Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. Remembered as a staunch Cold War warrior and 

advocate of committing sizable numbers of US ground forces to the war, especially 

during 1965–1966, McNamara’s 1995 admission of having had early doubts and 

now a troubled conscience about the role the US played in the wars in Southeast 

Asia, and that “he and his colleagues were wrong, terribly wrong,” caused a firestorm. 

CIA’s Harold Ford, while counted among the many critics, noted that McNamara’s 

“accounting of history is ambiguous, debatable, and, above all selective.” Instead of 

joining in the chorus of criticism, however, Ford focused here on what the secretary 

said about the CIA’s role in the war and how it affected his thinking. 

Hathaway, Robert M. “Richard Helms as DCI.” Studies in Intelligence 37, no. 4 

(1993): 33–40. Originally SECRET—Released in full.

The Director of Central Intelligence had a unique role during the wars in Southeast 

Asia as the primary intelligence adviser to the president—and, as a result, to the 

nation’s top policymakers and military leaders. The job could prove difficult as 

circumstances and personalities changed with each presidential administration. As 

Hathaway relates here, Richard Helms, a career intelligence officer, served as DCI for 

Lyndon Johnson and Richard M. Nixon from 1966 until 1973, earning a position of 

trust and influence with the former, but never overcoming the distrust of the latter. 

To Johnson, Helms “kept the game honest.” Yet as Hathaway notes, while Johnson 

valued Helms, he largely ignored CIA’s pessimistic analyses that conflicted with the 

optimistic line the White House took on the progress of the wars in Vietnam and 

Postwar Reflections
Part II: Annotated Selections

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 42

Postwar Reflections

elsewhere in Southeast Asia. As rocky as it may have been at times, Hathaway further 

notes, the LBJ years “seemed almost a golden era” of White House–CIA relations 

compared with what followed. The article is an excerpt from a book-length study of 

Helms, which has since been released with redactions. It is available in the FOIA 

Electronic Reading Room under Historical Collections/Richard Helms Collection.

Ford, Harold P. “William Colby: Retrospect.” Studies in Intelligence 40, no. 1 (1996): 

1–5. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

William E. Colby succeeded Richard Helms as DCI to President Richard Nixon and 

to President Gerald Ford—a tumultuous tenure running from May 1973 until January 

1976. Colby navigated CIA through times of significant changes in US domestic and 

foreign affairs to include the resignation of a president, the fall of South Vietnam, 

and the unprecedented public, media, and congressional scrutiny of CIA over real 

and alleged wrongdoing and illegal activities that resulted in wholesale changes in 

oversight and accountability. As Harold Ford writes, early on as DCI, Colby “enjoyed 

some success in illustrating his managerial skills, his powers of initiative, and—most 

of all—his unique confidence that the times called for a new, more open CIA.” 

Lewis, Anthony Marc. “Re-examining Our Perceptions on Vietnam.” Studies in 

Intelligence 17, no. 4 (1973): 1–62. Original SECRET—Released in full.

Even before the fall of the Republic of South Vietnam to communist forces in April 

1975, intelligence officers and academics began to search for enduring lessons 

from the decades of US involvement. Senior CIA career analyst Anthony Marc Lewis, 

educated as a political scientist, suggested that US policies were not as successful 

as they could have been due to the inability of Americans at all levels, especially 

within the CIA, “to see ‘the world of the Vietnamese’ as the Vietnamese do.” Lewis 

recommended a future emphasis on analytical training that assured recognition of 

“cultural blinders” such as he claimed had unconsciously affected CIA analysis. 

Laurie, Clayton. “Intelligence in Public Literature, Takes on Intelligence and the 

Vietnam War”—a review essay of Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 

1945–1975, by John Prados; Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of 

Lessons Not Learned, by Rufus Phillips; and This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet 

Offensive, by James S. Robbins.” Studies in Intelligence 55, no. 2 (2011): 73–77. 

Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

In this review essay concerning three books published during the period 2008–2010, 

CIA historian Clayton Laurie opens by recalling President John F. Kennedy’s question 

of two members of a factfinding team who offered different and opposing assessments 

of US progress in Vietnam in 1963: “The two of you did visit the same country, 

didn’t you?” Laurie suggests that readers of these three books seeking a better 

understanding of the CIA’s role in Southeast Asia and the lessons of that conflict 

for today may well ask a similar question. Nearly 40 years after the end of the US 

involvement, after the publication of a score of histories describing CIA activities 

during that time, and after the declassification of thousands of documents, opinions 

regarding Agency failures and accomplishments remain far apart, as do the authors’ 

interpretations of how the experiences of Vietnam apply to the conflicts of today.
43 CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Consolidated List of Cited Articles

and Other Resources

Absher, Kenneth Michael. “John Kearns and the Cold War in Laos.” Studies 

in Intelligence 46, no. 4 (2002): 45–54. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—

Released in part.

Ahern, Thomas L. Jr. “The CIA and the Government of Ngo Dinh Diem.” Studies in 

Intelligence 37, no. 4 (1993): 41–51. Originally SECRET—Released in part.

Allen, George W. “Covering Coups in Saigon.” Studies in Intelligence 33, no. 4 

(1989): 57–61. Originally SECRET—Released in part.

Allen, George W. “Intelligence in Small Wars.” Studies in Intelligence 35, no. 4 

(1991): 19–27. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Atkins, Merle, Kenneth C. Fuller, and Bruce Smith. “‘Rolling Thunder’ and Bomb 

Damage to Bridges.” Studies in Intelligence 13, no. 4 (1969): 1–9. Originally 

SECRET//NOFORN—Released in full.

Bunker, Ellsworth. “Vietnam in Retrospect.” Studies in Intelligence 18, no. 1 (1974): 

41–47. Originally CONFIDENTIAL—Released in full.

Castle, Timothy. “From the Bay of Pigs to Laos—Operation MILLPOND: The 

Beginning of a Distant Covert War.” Studies in Intelligence, 59, no. 2 (2015): 1–16. 

Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Elkes, Martin C. “The LAMS Story.” Studies in Intelligence 19, no. 2 (1975): 29–34. 

Originally SECRET—Released in part.

Finlayson, Andrew R. “The Tay Ninh Provincial Reconnaissance Unit and Its Role in 

the Phoenix Program, 1969–70.” Studies in Intelligence 51, no. 2 (2007): 59–69. 

Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Ford, Harold P. “The US Decision to Go Big in Vietnam.” Studies in Intelligence 29, 

no. 1 (1985): 1–15. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in full.

———, “Thoughts Engendered by Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect.” Studies in 

Intelligence 39, no. 1 (1995): 95–109. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

———, “Why CIA Analysts Were So Doubtful About Vietnam.” Studies in Intelligence

40, no. 2 (1996): 43–53. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

———, “William Colby: Retrospect.” Studies in Intelligence 40, no. 1 (1996): 1–5. 

Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Hall, Arthur B. “Landscape Analysis.” Studies in Intelligence 11, no. 3 (1967): 

65–75. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in full.

Part III: Consolidated List of Cited Articles and Other References
Part III: Consolidated List of Cited Articles and Other References

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 44

Hartness, William M. “Aspects of Counterinsurgency Intelligence.” Studies in 

Intelligence 7, no. 4 (1963): 71–83. Originally CONFIDENTIAL—Released in full.

Hathaway, Robert M. “Richard Helms as DCI.” Studies in Intelligence 37, no. 4 

(1993): 33–40. Originally SECRET—Released in full.

Holm, Richard L. “Recollections of a Case Officer in Laos, 1962–1964.” Studies in 

Intelligence 47, no. 1 (2003): 1–17. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Kitchens, Allen H. “Crisis and Intelligence: Two Case Studies [Tet and Iran].” Studies 

in Intelligence 28, No. 3 (1984): 71–78. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Laurie, Clayton. “Intelligence in Public Literature, Takes on Intelligence and the 

Vietnam War”—a review essay of Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–

1975, by John Prados; Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons 

Not Learned, by Rufus Phillips; This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive, 

by James S. Robbins. Studies in Intelligence 55, no. 2 (2011): 73–77. Originally 

UNCLASSIFIED.

Leary, William M. “CIA Air Operations in Laos, 1955–1974.” Studies in Intelligence

42, no. 2 (1998): 71–86. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Leidesdorf, Titus. “The Vietnamese as Operational Target.” Studies in Intelligence 12, 

no. 4 (1968): 57–71. Originally SECRET—Released in full.

LePage, Jean-Marc and Elie Tenenbaum. “French and American Intelligence Relations 

During the First Indochina War, 1950–1954.” Studies in Intelligence 55, no. 3 

(2011): 19–27. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Lewis, Anthony Marc. “Re-examining Our Perceptions on Vietnam.” Studies in 

Intelligence 17, no. 4 (1973): 1–62. Original SECRET—Released in full.

Linder, James C. “The Fall of Lima Site 85.” Studies in Intelligence 38, no. 4 

(1994): 43–52. Originally UNCLASSIFIED and reprinted with updating editor’s note 

and new afterword in Studies in Intelligence 59, no. 1 (March 2015).

Mark, David, “The Mayaguez Rescue Operation Revisited.” Studies in Intelligence 23, 

no. 2 (1979): 29–32. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in full.

Matthias, Willard C. “How Three Estimates Went Wrong.” Studies in Intelligence 12, 

no. 1 (1968): 27–38. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in part.

Maximov, William J. and Edward Scrutchings. “The Metal Traces Test.” Studies 

in Intelligence 11, no. 4 (1967): 37–44. Originally CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN—

Released in full.

McCann, Frederic. “Gathering Intelligence in Laos in 1968.” Studies in Intelligence

49, no. 1 (2005): 27–31. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Palmer, Gen. Bruce. “US Intelligence and Vietnam.” Studies in Intelligence 28, no. 5 

(Special Issue, 1984). Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in part. 
Part III: Consolidated List of Cited Articles and Other References

45 CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Petchell, Robert A. “Cash on Delivery.” Studies in Intelligence 17, no. 3 (1973): 1–7. 

Originally SECRET—Released in part.

Peterson, Gordon I. and David C. Taylor. “A Shield and Sword: Intelligence Support 

to Communications with US POWs in Vietnam.” Studies in Intelligence 60, no. 1 

(2016): 1–16. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Pribbenow, Merle L. “The Man in the Snow White Cell.” Studies in Intelligence 48, 

no. 1 (2004): 59–69. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Puchalla, Edward F. “Communist Defense Against Aerial Surveillance in Southeast 

Asia.” Studies in Intelligence 14, no. 2 (1970): 31–78. Originally SECRET//

NOFORN—Released in full. 

Schiattareggia, M. H. “Counterintelligence in Counter-Guerrilla Operations.” Studies 

in Intelligence 6, no. 3 (1962): 1–24. Originally SECRET—Released in full and 

reprinted in Studies in Intelligence 57, no. 2 (2013): 39–63.

Schwarzchild, Edward T. “The Assessment of Insurgency.” Studies in Intelligence 7, 

no. 4 (1963): 85–89. Originally SECRET—Released in full. 

Sinclair, Robert, “One Intelligence Analyst Remembers Another: A Review of Who the 

Hell Are We Fighting?—The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars.” 

Studies in Intelligence 50, no. 4 (2006): 1–9. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Smith, Russell Jack. “Intelligence Production During the Helms Regime.” Studies in 

Intelligence 39, no. 4 (1995): 93–102. Originally SECRET—Released in part. 

Steinmeyer, Walter. “The Intelligence Role in Counterinsurgency.” Studies in 

Intelligence 9, no. 4 (1965): 57–63. Originally SECRET—Released in full and 

reprinted in Studies in Intelligence 59, no. 4 (December 2015). Steinmeyer is a 

penname for a former senior operations officer, Theodore Shackley.

Stockinger, Edwin K. “Five Weeks at Phalane.” Studies in Intelligence 17, no. 1 

(1973): 11–19. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in part.

Swift, Carleton A., Richard D. Kovar, and Russell J. Bowen. “Intelligence in Recent 

Public Literature: Why Vietnam? Prelude to America’s Albatross.” Studies in 

Intelligence 25, no. 2 (1981): 99–116. Originally UNCLASSIFIED.

Tidwell, William A. “A New Kind of Air Targeting.” Studies in Intelligence 11, no. 1 

(1967): 55–60. Originally CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN—Released in full.
Part III: Consolidated List of Cited Articles and Other References

CIA and the Wars in Southeast Asia 46

Other References:

Hathaway, Robert M. and Russell Jack Smith, Richard Helms as Director of Central 

Intelligence. Available at http://www.foia.cia.gov/document/richard-helms-directorcentral-intelligence-robert-m-hathaway-and-russell-jack-smith.

Robarge, David. John McCone as Director of Central Intelligence, 1961–65. 

Available at http://www.foia.cia.gov/collection/john-mccone-director-centralintelligence-1961-1965. Originally SECRET//NOFORN—Released in part.

———, Archangel: CIA’s Supersonic A-12 Reconnaissance Aircraft. Available at 

http://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/booksand-monographs/a-12/index.html

Air America: Holding Up the Airman’s Bond. CIA Historical Documents Collection. 

Available at http://www.foia.cia.gov/collection/air-america-upholding-airmens-bond.

The National Intelligence Council Vietnam Collection of Estimates and Papers. 

Available at http://www.foia.cia.gov/collection/vietnam-collection.

The Vietnam Histories of Thomas L. Ahern, Jr. Available at http://www.foia.cia.gov/

collection/vietnam-histories.

The Collection of Presidential Briefing Products from 1961 to 1969. Available at 

http://www.foia.cia.gov/collection/PDBs.

CENTER for the STUDY of INTELLIGENCE