Paul R. Pillar - Intelligence and U. S. Foreign Policy

INTELLIGENCE AND
U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform

Paul R. Pillar

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press
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New York Chichester, West Sussex
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E-ISBN 978-0-231-52780-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pillar, Paul R., 1947
Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy : Iraq, 9/11, and misguided Reform / Paul R. Pillar.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-15792-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-52780-4 (electronic)

1. Intelligence serviceUnited States. 2. Iraq War, 2003 3. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001. I. Title.

JK468.I6P55 2010
327.1273dc22 2010048141

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March 29, 1973, found me aboard a C-141 transport plane, along with fifty other U.S. servicemen, returning to the United States after duty in Vietnam. The flight was the last in the withdrawal of U.S. military forces under the terms of the peace agreement that the United States and North Vietnam had reached in Paris two months earlier (not to be confused with the much more hazardous and chaotic exodus of the few remaining Americans when the agreement broke down and Communist forces overran South Vietnam in April 1975). I was on that final flight because my assignment since arriving in Vietnam the previous April was at a replacement depot called Camp Alpha at Tan Son Nhut Air Base on the outskirts of Saigon, which during the last year of the war was the processing point for almost all U.S. military personnel entering or leaving Vietnam. Once the peace agreement was reached, those of us who did the processing at Camp Alpha had to send the other remaining troops on their way before we ourselves could leave.

What had once been an American force of more than half a million was down to about twenty-four thousand when the Paris Accord was signed. The withdrawal of that residual force (except for a few embassy guards and members of a joint military commission to monitor implementation of the agreement) was supposed to be synchronized with the repatriation of American prisoners of war from North Vietnam. The withdrawal proceeded in fits and starts because of disagreements over implementation of the agreement. Sometimes we would load a plane with soldiers who happily thought they were within minutes of leaving Vietnam, only to be ordered to unload it because an aircraft with prisoners of war had not taken off on schedule from Hanoi. The biggest hiccup occurred with two weeks to go in the withdrawal, when our flight operations were suspended altogether. Once the underlying problem was resolved, we had three days to ship out the last five thousand troops. And we had to do this while signing over remaining property to the embassy, making final payments to our Vietnamese employees, packing our own bags, and trying to keep the compound we were about to vacate from being looted. I got almost no sleep during those three days and as a result slept most of the way across the Pacific.

We at Camp Alpha had it easy, however, compared to those we processedand many more before themwho had experienced directly the stresses and horrors of combat. Other than two Viet Cong rocket barrages against the airbase, I saw not enemy fire but instead some of the other ways the Vietnam War inflicted damage on the army as well as on American society. U.S. troops burgeoning use of narcotics had become a particular problem by that late stage of the conflict. The most important piece of processing we did with soldiers exiting Vietnam was a urinalysis to identify the disturbingly large number of heroin users.

After landing in California, we on that last flight exited the plane onto a red carpet and along a receiving line that included several generals. The arrival festivities were partly a celebration of the end of an eight-year-long national nightmare. Later that night I joined my battalion commander and one of our noncommissioned officers to participate in another ceremony at the since-closed army base in Oakland to deactivate our unit, the Ninetieth Replacement Battalion. The unit had first been created to serve the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and had later seen service in World War II. A reporter at the ceremony asked for my thoughts. I expressed hope that the battalion was furling its colors for the last time and would never need to be activated again.

These events were to have connections with subsequent professional endeavors, including ones I never could have anticipated at the time. Having participated at the low end of an effort to extract the United States from a war, I became interested in how things work at the high end. This interest led to a doctoral dissertation, which I later turned into a book, on the principles and dynamics of peace negotiations and the role that military force plays as an accompaniment to them.