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East Asia

China

With the Chinese push, the eyes of the NSC turned north. With no end to the avalanche of money, the CIA explored every option in China. From Chiang Kai-shek's promise of a million Kuomingtang, to the western Chinese Muslim Horsemen of the Hui clans who had ties to Chinese Nationalists. The CIA ran operations from White Dog island with the nationalists for months until it was discovered that the nationalist commander's Chief of Staff was a spy for Mao. $50 million went to Okinawa based Chinese refugees who wove tales of sizable support on the mainland. In July '52, the CIA would send a team of expatriates in. Four months later they would radio for help. It was an ambush. Two CIA officers, Jack Downey, and Dick Fecteau. Fresh out out of Ivy League colleges they would both spend 19+ years in captivity.

Finally the CIA would turn to nationalist General Li Mi in Burma. When Li Mi's troops crossed the border into China an ambush awaited them too. The CIA would later discover that Li Mi's Bangkok radioman worked for Mao. CIA supplies still flowed, but Li Mi's men retreated to Burma, and set up a global heroin empire in Burma's Golden Triangle.

Korea

On Yong-Do island in Busan, Hans Tofte had turned over a thousand North Korean expatriates into what the National Security Council hoped would become a fifth column. They were divided into three tasking groups. Intelligence gathering through infiltration, guerrilla warfare, and pilot rescue. Tofte would be filing reports indicating success in operations long after any hope for the infiltration teams was cold in the ground.

In '52, CIA covert action would send 1,500 more expatriate agents north. Seoul station chief, and Army Colonel Albert Haney would openly celebrate the capabilities of those agents, and the information they sent. Some Soeul State Department intelligence officers were skeptical, but the party lasted until Haney was replaced, in September '52, by John Limond Hart, a Europe veteran with a vivid memory for bitter experiences of misinformation. Hart was immediately suspicious of the parade of successes reported by Tofte and Haney.

After a three month investigation, Hart determined that the entirety of the station's product from Korean sources was either an opportunist's lie, or the misinformation from the enemy, including reports hailed, by American military commanders, as "one of the outstanding intelligence reports of the war." Another part of the problem was the isolation of the Hermit Kingdom, and its relative lack of importance compared to China, and Japan, which led to a deficiency in Korean language skills. After the war, internal reviews by the CIA would corroborate Hart's findings. The CIA's Soeul station had 200 officers, but not a single speaker of Korean. The NSC's $152 million a year covert war was one part meat grinder, and one part delivery system for enemy misinformation.

Hart reported to Washington that Seoul station was hopeless, and could not be salvaged. Loftus Becker, Deputy Director of Intelligence, was sent personally to tell Hart that the CIA, to save face, had to keep the station open. Becker returned to Washington, pronounced the situation to be "hopeless", and that, after touring the CIA's Far East operations, the CIA's ability to gather intelligence in the far east was "almost negligible". He then resigned. While Allen Dulles was extolling the success of the CIA's guerrillas in Korea, AF Colonel James Kellis says Dulles had been informed that those guerrillas were under the control of the enemy. Frank Wisner put the Korean failures down to a need "to develop the quantity and kind of people we must have if we are to successfully carry out the heavy burdens which have been placed on us." A compounding factor was that, even at the height of the Korean war, the CIA would keep its primary focus on Europe, and the Soviet Union, through the entire war, the Korean War would always be seen as a diversion from Europe.

South-East Asia

Indonesia

The charismatic leader of Indonesia was President Sukarno. His declaration of neutrality in the cold war put the suspicions of the CIA on him. After Sukarno hosted Bandung Conference, promoting the Non-Aligned Movement. The Eisenhower White House responded with NSC 5518 authorizing "all feasible covert means" to move Indonesia into the Western sphere. The CIA started funding the Masyumi Party. Sukano confounded the CIA's Jakarta station, which had few speakers of native languages, and Al Ulmer, the new head of the CIA's Far East division, knew little about the country. Spooked by the communist PKI party moving into the third spot, the CIA's alarmed response was in contrast to that of the Ambassador, who maintained that Sukarno maintained an open door to the West.

The US had no clear policy on Indonesia. Ike sent his spicial assistant for security operations F. M. Dearborn Jr. to Jakarta. His report that there was great instability, and that the US lacked strong, stable allies, reinforced the domino theory. Indonesia suffered from what he described as "subversion by democracy". The CIA decided to attempt another military coup in Indonesia, where the Indonesian military was trained by the US, had a strong professional relationship with the US Military, had a pro-American officer corps, which had strong support for the government, and a strong belief in civilian control of the military, instilled partly by its close association with the US Military. Demonstrating an intolerance for dissent, the CIA instigated the transfer of the well respected Ambassador Allison, who had a strong background in Asia, to Czechoslovakia.

On September 25, 1957, Ike ordered the CIA to start a revolution in Indonesia with the goal of regime change. Three days later, Blitz, a Soviet controlled weekly in India reported that the US was plotting to overthrow Sukarno. The story was picked up by the media in Indonesia. One of the first parts of the operation was an 11,500 ton US navy ship landing at Sumatra, delivering weapons for as many as 8,000 potential revolutionaries. The delivery drew a crowd of spectators, and, again, little thought was given to plausible dependability. Counter to CIA predictions, the Indonesian military, with some planning assistance from their colleagues in the US Military, the only people the CIA had successfully kept their involvement a secret from, reacted swiftly and effectively.

CIA Agent Al Pope's bombing and strafing Indonesia in a CIA B-26 was described by the CIA to the President as attacks by "dissident planes". Al Pope's B-26 was shot down over Indonesia on May 18, and he bailed out. When he was captured, the Indonesian military found his personnel records, after action reports, and his membership card for the officer's club at Clark Field. On March 9, Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, and the brother of DI Allen Dulles, made a public statement calling for a revolt against communist despotism under Sukarno. Three days later the CIA reported to the White House that the Indonesian Army's actions against CIA instigated revolution was suppressing communism.

After Indonesia, Ike displayed mistrust of both the CIA, and its Director, Allen Dulles. Allen Dulles too displayed mistrust of the CIA itself. Abbot Smith, a CIA analyst who would rise to the position of chief of the Office of National Estimates said "We had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened had to be made to fit into this picture. Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin." Something reflected in the intelligence failure in Indonesia. On December 16, Ike received a report from his intelligence board of consultants that said that the agency was "incapable of making objective appraisals of its own intelligence information as well as its own operations."

Vietnam

See also: Vietnam War, Phoenix Program, and Operation Barrel Roll

The OSS Patti mission arrived in Vietnam near the end of World War II, and had significant interaction with the leaders of many Vietnamese factions, including Ho Chi Minh. While the Patti mission forwarded Ho's proposals for phased independence, with the French or even the United States as the transition partner, the US policy of containment opposed forming any government that was communist in nature.

The first CIA mission to Indochina, under the code name Saigon Military Mission arrived in 1954, under Edward Lansdale. U.S.-based analysts were simultaneously trying to project the evolution of political power, both if the scheduled referendum chose merger of the North and South, or if the South, the U.S. client, stayed independent. Initially, the US focus in Southeast Asia was on Laos, not Vietnam.

The CIA Tibetan program consists of political plots, propaganda distribution, as well as paramilitary and intelligence gathering based on U.S. commitments made to the Dalai Lama in 1951 and 1956.

During the period of U.S. combat involvement in the Vietnam War, there was considerable argument about progress among the Department of Defense under Robert McNamara, the CIA, and, to some extent, the intelligence staff of Military Assistance Command Vietnam. In general, the military was consistently more optimistic than the CIA. Sam Adams, a junior CIA analyst with responsibilities for estimating the actual damage to the enemy, eventually resigned from the CIA, after expressing concern to Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms with estimates that were changed for interagency and White House political reasons. Adams afterward wrote the book War of Numbers.

Sometime between 1959 and 1961 the CIA started Project Tiger, a program of dropping South Vietnamese agents into North Vietnam to gather intelligence. These were a tragic failure; the Deputy Chief for Project Tiger, Captain Do Van Tien, admitted that he was an agent for Hanoi. President Diem's brutal government violently repressed the Buddhist majority. On August 23, 1963, after being approached by a South Vietnamese General, Kennedy ordered the newly appointed South Vietnamese Ambassador to make detailed plans for Diem's replacement. DI McCone compared Diem to a bad pitcher, saying that it would be unwise to get rid of him unless you could replace him with a better one. Kennedy's Cabinet was dubious about the coup, and JFK would come to regret it. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, a longtime political opponent of JFK, was jealous that the CIA station had more money, power, and people than his staff. Lodge revealed the name of John Richardson, the CIA station chief, to a reporter, branding him an agent of the CIA, he later moved into Richardson's Saigon house, which was larger than the one Lodge had been in. The coup occurred on 1 November.

Johnson

The assassination of Diem sparked a cascade of coups in Saigon, and at the same time the city was wracked with assassinations. Johnson, the new President wanted to refocus the CIA on intelligence, rather than covert action, while the Kennedy's were seen as relentless in their hounding of the CIA to produce results, Johnson would soon give them only the most minimal attention.

In the face of the failure of Project Tiger, the Pentagon wanted CIA paramilitary forces to participate in their Op Plan 64A, this resulted in the CIA's foreign paramilitaries being put under the command of the DOD, a move seen as a slippery slope inside the CIA, a slide from covert action towards militarization. After touring vietnam in '64, DI McCone and sec def McNamara had different views of the US position. McCone believed that as long as the ho chi minh trail was active the US would struggle.

DI McCone had statutory control over all intelligence committees, but in reality, but the military had near total control of the DIA, the NRO, the NSA, and many other aspects. Importantly, President Johnson almost completely ignored the CIA. In effect, the military controlled the 2/3rds of the CIA budget laid out for covert action. McCone, the unspoken hero of the cuban missile crisis, submitted his resignation in the summer, but Johnson would not accept it until after the election.

On August 4, SecDef McNamara gave President Johnson the raw translation of intercepted korean transmissions directly from the NSA which, ostensibly, reported to DI McCone, rather than to McNamara. It would later be determined that the transmission took place before the weapon discharges that night which leads to the conclusion that the transmission refers to the events of the attack the day before, and that, although Destroyers Maddox, and Turner Joy fired hundreds of shells at intermittent radar contacts, they were firing at false returns.

A CIA analyst's assessment of Vietnam was that the US was "becoming progressively divorced from reality... [and] proceeding with far more courage than wisdom". The CIA had created an exhaustive report, "The Vietnamese Communist's Will to Persist". This created a key flashpoint in the US government, PAVN troop levels,. Was it 500k or more as the CIA believed, or 300k or less as the commanders of US forces in Vietnam believed. The argument went on for months, but Helms finally OK'd a report saying that PAVN troop levels were 299,000 or less. The DOD argument was that whatever the facts on the ground, to publicly admit any higher number could be the last nail in the coffin of the war for vietnam in the press.