I have never quite decided whether I should consider myself a Vietnam veteran or not. On those occasions when I dress up, I proudly wear a miniature Combat Infantry Badge in my lapel. I did spend 22 months in Vietnam, but the two are not related. It was nearly 30 years earlier, in Burma, that I earned the badge, as a machine gunner with the 475th Infantry Regiment of the Mars Task Force. In Vietnam I was a CIA officer stationed in Saigon after the war was officially over.

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To begin at the beginning, in early 1973 I had been with the agency for 23 years, more than half of that overseas in south Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In 1971 I gave up a branch chief job to attend the Naval War College at Newport, R.I. The class consisted of 100 senior Navy officers and 100 Army, Air Force and Marine officers, along with a dozen civilian intelligence officers from the State Department, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

When I came back to Langley, I was killing time as a special assistant, waiting impatiently for an appropriate opening in Africa, when I was offered a job in Saigon. I had followed events in Vietnam, but had never considered volunteering. My wife and two children had always accompanied me on previous tours, and I discussed it with them. Unlike the standard military tour of one year in Vietnam, the usual overseas posting for the Foreign Service, the CIA and several other agencies was two years, without any home leave. Vietnam during the war was an exception for civilians: The tour was still two years, but families could not accompany the men, who were at least in theory given a couple of weeks’ leave every six months.

That policy now had been modified. The leave policy for men stayed the same, but wives could accompany their husbands, whereas children could not. Even if the wife accompanied him, the husband was still permitted to visit his children periodically but the wife could not, at least not at government expense. I had assumed that my wife would stay with the children, but she considered that out of the question. The kids were miffed, but agreed to share an apartment. We had to promise they could visit, even though it would be at our expense.

My wife and I arrived in Saigon on June 16, 1973. The agency had its own transient facility in Saigon, the Duc Hotel. It had a dining room and a small swimming pool on the roof. A few single people lived there full time, but the primary function was temporary housing for arriving and departing employees, and for employees from the outlying bases coming in for consultation or a bit of R&R and shopping.

Anxious to get out of our tiny room over a busy street, we first accepted a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a six-unit building. Unfortunately, the building was located at the intersection of two major thoroughfares, and from 6 a.m. until curfew at midnight the traffic noise was overwhelming. After a couple of months we moved to a house that was smaller than the apartment and in bad condition, but was located on a cul de sac with a high wall around it. My wife supervised a crew of Vietnamese workmen in the restoration process.

The CIA head office in Vietnam was the’station,’ in the embassy building. There were five subordinate ‘bases’ in the appropriate military regions (MRs), now called administrative regions: Da Nang for MR I, Nha Trang for MR II, Bien Hoa for MR III, Can Tho for MR IV and the Saigon base for the Saigon–Gia Dinh district. There were also subbases scattered around the country.

The Saigon base was located behind the embassy in what was called the Norodom Complex. That complex housed the consulate, the military attachés and the Saigon base. It had its own gate, and a Marine guard in a booth controlled access.

I was assigned to the Saigon base. The base had two branches, designated Liaison Operations and Internal Operations. ‘Bill J.,’ the chief of base (COB), wanted me to head up a new external branch focused on a target of opportunity, the Hungarian and Polish members of the International Commission for Control and Supervision (ICCS).

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