A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam Read Online Free PDF

the Cold War. A need to serve and a desire to serve in secret were dominant traits in his personality. He had parachuted into German-occupied France in August 1944 as a twenty-four-year-old major in the OSS, schooled in the arts of sabotage and terrorism at an English country estate (Lucien Conein had been one of his classmates there), to lead a French Resistance group against the Nazis. The war had not ended for him with the surrender of Germany nine months later. Godless Communism, a term that meant just what it said to Colby, had replaced Fascism as the menace to humankind. The Roman Catholicism he had inherited from his father, an Army colonel who had been a convert, and from his Irish mother had made him from his student days at Princeton as fervently anti-Communist as he had been anti-Fascist. The question had simply been which menace to fight first.
    In contrast to Lansdale, Bill Colby had been an unsung member of the clandestine service. His way had been quiet and sustained. He had carried out the desires of the U.S. government in Vietnam over much of the previous twelve years, beginning in early 1959 as deputy and subsequently chief of the CIA station in Saigon and then in the same promotion pattern as deputy and chief of the Far East Division of clandestine operations. He had supervised the Agency’s first counterguerrilla programs in the South. On President Kennedy’s order, he had resumed the covert warfare against the Communist North that had been allowed to lapse after Lansdale’s years. He had infiltrated by parachute and boat teams of Vietnamese terrorists and saboteurs trained by the CIA to try to start a guerrilla war against the Hanoi authorities like the one the Viet Cong were waging in South Vietnam. In 1967 he had helped Robert Komer, a former CIA officer and the fifth pallbearer Ellsberg recognized, to set up the Phoenix Program to kill, jail, or intimidate into surrender the members of the secret Communist-led government the guerrillas had established in the rural areas of the South. The program had resulted in the death or imprisonment of tens of thousands of Vietnamese. The antiwar movement had condemned Colby as an assassin and war criminal. “Wanted for Murder” posters with his picture on them had been plastered on the buildings of college campuses in Washington. None of the accusations had unsettled Colby’s faith in his cause and his conviction that the work he was doing was necessary and good. His manner had remained as gentle and as friendly and—not without some calculation—as disarming as it had always been. In 1968, Komer had departed and Colby had taken over the entire pacification programand become Vann’s superior. He had appreciated Vann’s talents. Vann, who sought klieg lights and center stage, and Colby, who preferred to perform in the shadows, had come to respect each other.
    The two soldiers positioned the flag-draped coffin at the end of the center aisle before the altar. The official pallbearers took their places in the pews at the left front of the chapel where William Rogers, the secretary of state, and Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense, were already seated. After the Army chaplain had read from the scripture and given his sermon, Robert Komer rose from the first pew and walked up onto the altar to deliver the eulogy.
    Komer had been the general of the pacification campaign, what the newspapers had called “the other war in Vietnam.” A man of medium height and build, balding in middle age, he had been noticeable among the pallbearers. Unlike the other civilians in suits of dark colors, he was dressed in light gray. His suit had been made for him by a proper London tailor during his CIA years back in the 1950s. He had worn it today because Komer felt that the etiquette of a eulogy demanded a vest and it was the only summer suit he owned that had one.
    President Johnson had once regarded Komer as an extraordinary problem solver. The president had sent him to