The Normality of Conspiracy

  

The Normality of Conspiracy

Peter Schultz

 

                  The following is from the book, Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby.

 

                  “Frustration drove Bill Colby after the Diem assassination…. Top of Colby’s list would be revamping the CIA’s Saigon station. Ambassador Lodge had effectively sabotaged John Richardson, and McCone had been prevented from sending out Colby in his stead, but the Far East Division chief became determined to have his man, not Lodge’s. It was a strike against acting chief of station Dave Smith that Lodge liked him, and Smith’s chances were not helped by his authorship of the cable advising Langley not to dismiss assassination, an analysis Colby considered to have undercut his efforts in Washington. Smith’s days in Saigon were numbered.” [132]

 

                  So, Colby was playing the part of conspirator, as were his political enemies, Ambassador Lodge, for example. “He, McCone, and the CIA might have lost the policy battle in Washington, but Colby was determined to effect change directly, on the ground in Vietnam. This became the quiet subtext of his post-coup swing through Southeast Asia.” [ibid] So, this “swing” was part of Colby’s conspiracy to change things “on the ground in Vietnam.” Colby, the conspirator, was committed to controlling US policies in Vietnam and, so, “That trip turned into the point of departure for new CIA initiatives, greatly increasing the agency’s role in the Vietnam war, as well as Southeast Asia more broadly…. In a way he seemed to submerge his loss of friends in the Ngo family with frantic activity that might avenge them by winning the Vietnam war.” [ibid]

 

                  Colby was playing the part of political conspirator, seeking to impose the policies he thought appropriate, and he seemed to think of this as normal politics. It wasn’t a “quagmire” in Vietnam that led the US into a major ground war in Asia; it was the “quagmire” of the American political order that led the US into that major war in Asia. Or it can be said that the secret wars of William Colby, et. al., led the US into a major ground war in Asia. The “quagmire” responsible for the fiasco of the Vietnam war wasn’t in Vietnam; it was in the United States, and it was created by conspirators like William Colby.