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309 chaPTer 14 Disengagement In retrospect, Hanoi’s 1968 return to a focus on its hamlet and village organization seems to have offered an opportunity for the GVN and its American patrons to exploit allied military superiority in expanded pacification operations . General Abrams did in fact devote more attention than Westmoreland had to the rural security aspects of the conflict, and new GVN initiatives in land reform and hamlet self-defense were to follow. But the drive to compete with the Viet Cong in the political mobilization of the countryside faltered after the Tet offensive, partly because of CIA’s withdrawal from a leadership role.1 That withdrawal had begun just as President Johnson announced his decision not to run for reelection. As with CIDG in 1962, the agency’s program innovations and its managerial and logistic flexibility had drawn it into a lead role that its relatively small size made impossible to sustain. There were now almost 1,000 people in the Saigon Station, most of them, including 400 contractors and people detailed from other agencies, managing or supporting provincial operations. The various cadre programs employed almost 54,000 Vietnamese, and the station was paying about half of the 10,000 informants run by the Police Special Branch.2 In preparation since late 1967, CIA’s disengagement had begun when the Defense Department assumed funding responsibility for the RDC program on 1 April 1968. At Komer’s insistence, the responsibility for operational management remained with the agency, for the time being, with the station running the program on behalf of CORDS. As early as February, only a month after the Tet offensive, the chief of Vietnam operations at headquarters, Douglas Blaufarb, was anticipating instructions to reduce the hiring of contract employees for pacification. But Komer still resisted any suggestion of a diminished CIA role VIETNAM DECLASSIFIED 310 in pacification, and military personnel detailed to the station continued for the moment to supplement rather than replace agency officers.3 Two months later, Defense was hoping to transfer at least the financial burden to the Vietnamese, and there ensued a protracted debate with MACV over the possible disruption of the RDC program once it had to compete with other GVN budget priorities. Only in the PRU program did the agency commitment continue to grow: the Tet experience had strengthened the station’s argument for more teams and more firepower, and the interagency 303 Committee approved an additional $5.7 million, including $800,000 for automatic weapons and funding to expand the program from 3,500 to 6,000 men.4 If Tet reinforced the perception of an indispensable PRU, it weakened the CIA commitment to Revolutionary Development. Station reporting and the witness of returning case officers led headquarters to ask whether RD cadres now constituted anything more than just “another type of overt security force.” If not, could they become something more? And if the answer to that too was negative, why not merge them with the MACV-supported Popular Forces?5 The station’s reply to this pointed query has not been found. But Lew Lapham was in any case about to leave Saigon, and the CIA role in pacification would change with his departure. Meanwhile, Bill Colby had by no means despaired of Revolutionary Development’s potential as a pacification device. He also reposed more confidence than Komer had in the potential of other agencies to staff at least the RD Cadre program, albeit with agency training and field supervision for the non-CIA complement. He would have had to move in this direction, whatever his preference, when Ted Shackley replaced Lapham as chief of station.6 Shackley arrived in December 1968 with instructions from DCI Helms to get the station out of “nation-building” and to reemphasize intelligence collection . With this mandate, he saw no reason to take more than perfunctory interest in the motivational side of pacification. His first report on the subject , incoherent even as an exercise in bureaucratic boilerplate, concluded that “by bringing a modicum of physical security to the rural population through self-help, intelligence, civic action, and paramilitary efforts the people can be motivated to oppose the Viet Cong, and in so doing strengthen the basic foundations of the Government of South Vietnam.”7 If “paramilitary efforts” referred to village self-defense, the proposition became circular, with self-defense used to establish the motivation without which it could not be undertaken in the first place. This apparent incomprehension that motivation had to precede...

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