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effort to exert control over rural areas through terror tactics.
During the NVA occupation of the old imperial capital of Hue
in the 1968 Tet Offensive, Communist execution squads mas-
sacred as many as three thousand unarmed prisoners, including
 cruel tyrants and reactionary elements, who had been slated
for extermination months earlier. Commenting on the worst
massacre of the Vietnam War, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian
Stanley Karnow noted that the victims  had been shot or
clubbed to death, or buried alive. He added that America had
hardly noticed those atrocities because it was preoccupied with
 the incident at My Lai in which American soldiers had
massacred a hundred Vietnamese peasants, women and chil-
dren among them.
108 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
Dalat, South Vietnam, October 1969 "  Hang on to your lunch,
the contract pilot said with a wry grin, dropping the nose of
the Beech Twin Baron toward the rolling green landscape be-
low. We dived in a tight corkscrew, trying to stay within the
invisible protective cone of ARVN control, which ended at the
perimeter of the small airstrip below.
This trip to the lovely old colonial town of Dalat in the
 Switzerland of Vietnam was typical of most of my assign-
ments during six years in the war zone. As had been the case
in Laos, I had become one of the leading artist/validators
supporting Agency operations in Vietnam. But my artistic
abilities were developing beyond the rigid discipline required
in the straightforward duplication of enemy documents. In the
next several days, my skills would be rigorously tested.
The plane jolted onto the muddy strip, and the pilot imme-
diately jammed on the brakes. I soon found myself standing
in the cool sunshine of the Central Highlands, watching the
Baron roar down the runway and spiral into a tight, reverse
corkscrew climb. Besides the ARVN troops manning sand-
bagged pillboxes on the perimeter, I was all alone.
The Viet Cong had hit the local marketplace two days before
in a grenade attack, killing and maiming innocent people to
discredit the South Vietnamese government and to demonstrate
their ability to penetrate a tightly guarded provincial capital.
I felt the familiar surge of adrenaline and anxiety, which always
seemed to haunt me before a new mission.
Suddenly, I heard the roar of an engine behind me. An eleg-
ant 1939 Citroen traction-avante lunged into view like a cougar,
lurched across the field, and skidded to a stop beside me. Two
Americans in unmarked fatigues, carrying CAR-15 assault
rifles and draped in bandoleers bulging with extra clips,
jumped out to scan the runway.
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 109
 Sorry to be late, one of the case officers said, grabbing my
duffel and throwing it into the cavernous rear seat of the Cit-
roën. The other American shoved me in after my bag. In a flash,
they were back in the front seat, and the driver threw the car
in gear and stamped on the accelerator. Both men kept their
short-barreled weapons pointed out the open windows, anti-
cipating an ambush. We were careening down the switchback
dirt road from the airport to town before I realized that this
ancient saloon car actually had an eight-track stereo. As we
bounced along at reckless speed, Johnny Cash was singing  I
Walk the Line. The scene was so bizarre that I exploded in
fits of laughter as I tumbled around the backseat.
The local CIA base consisted of an old colonial French villa
with a sandbagged gate and windows screened with cyclone
fencing to thwart Chinese-made B-40 rocket-propelled gren-
ades. The base also operated several safe houses near the AR-
VN military academy. It was there that I met one of the most
intriguing people I would encounter during my trips in and
out of Vietnam.
A woman I will call Ming, in her early twenties, was a former
member of the Viet Cong. She had rallied to the government
side under the Chieu Hoi program. In itself, this action was not
unusual as the war dragged on, but her story was. For several
years Ming had been the cook at a Communist safe house used
as a way station for infiltrating North Vietnamese Trinh Sat
intelligence service officers off the southern terminus of the
Ho Chi Minh Trail and into Saigon. Their dual mission was to
penetrate the South Vietnamese government and ARVN, and
to establish clandestine communication links with Hanoi. When
Ming revealed this, we had to find a way to identify these key
intelligence operatives, because it was obvious that their
presence in the South was compromising the effectiveness of
Saigon s war effort.
110 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
But Ming was an uneducated peasant girl and, being good
operatives, the Hanoi officers never used true names or re-
vealed personal details in her presence. Ming, however, had
a near-photographic memory. I had already helped South Vi-
etnamese counterparts prepare police sketches of suspected
VC cadres by debriefing witnesses, but the trail Ming and I
had to follow stretched back years. Initially, I wasn t optimistic.
Then, I spent several hours talking to Ming through an inter-
preter and realized she was indeed a remarkable source.
It turned out that Ming had a romantic streak, a quality
discouraged by the Viet Cong. To amuse herself, she had cre-
ated fantasy tales for each of the several dozen people who
had passed through the safe house en route to Saigon over the
years. These tales were her mental cues for recalling their exact
appearance and mannerisms.
Working with the interpreter, Ming would patiently describe
the fantasy image she had created for each real person. Then
we would study albums with hundreds of photographs of
Northern and Southern Vietnamese, and she would select
certain features shared by the subject of her fantasy and the
people in the photographs. As I sketched, combining visual
details from the photographs with her rich descriptions, Ming
would suggest refinements. For example, one of her stories
concerned the  worried student who had lost his books and
developed the nervous tic of twisting his left earlobe. Another
character was the  impatient doctor who cleared his throat
and brusquely interrupted people before they could complete
their statements.
After two and a half days of debriefings and sketches, Ming
and I had finished twenty-six face-on and profile portraits of
important Communist intelligence infiltrators. Although it
occurred to me that she could have been nothing more than
an excellent storyteller with a vivid imagination, I did not think
so by the end her descriptions were simply too detailed and
consistent.
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 111
As events turned out, South Vietnamese counterintelligence
officers made thirteen arrests in the following months based
on those portraits. Each of the suspects confessed, and most
were caught either red-handed, engaged in acts of espionage,
or carrying spy paraphernalia. They were all involved in run-
ning local agent networks, consisting of Viet Cong who had
penetrated the foreign community in Saigon. Their agents were
our trusted servants and employees, supposedly  vetted by
our Vietnamese counterparts. For years, these operatives had
enjoyed privileged access to the homes of Americans working
in Saigon.
Savannakhet, Laos, July 1972 " American ground units had
withdrawn from Vietnam earlier that year, leaving behind
small detachments to guard coastal enclaves such as Danang
and Saigon. But the devastating use of American air power
three months earlier to defeat the NVA s massive Easter Of-
fensive revealed that military issues still needed to be resolved.
Nevertheless, America wanted out of the war, which threatened
to destroy our society from within and render us impotent on
the larger geopolitical stage of the Cold War.
In July 1972, with the American pullout almost complete, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]