EXPERT Q&A — John McLaughlin was drafted and sent to Vietnam as an intelligence officer in 1969. He would later have a distinguished career in the Central Intelligence Agency, ultimately serving as its Acting Director. We asked McLaughlin – who is also a Cipher Brief expert – to share reflections of his time in Vietnam, and the lessons he drew from his own experience and the U.S. experience writ large.
The Cipher Brief: What stands out in your mind all these years later, from your tour of duty in Vietnam?
McLaughlin: I was very young. I had been drafted and I went to officer candidate school, so I arrived as a second lieutenant. I was commissioned into intelligence, so that was my introduction to the field. That became my profession for 32 years. What stands out in my mind is that I arrived just a month or two months after the [January 1968] Tet Offensive and the country was still in turmoil.
Our job was to figure out how the Tet offensive had occurred, and to keep it from happening again. Most specifically, I had to figure out what were the infiltration routes that allowed them to come in secretly and surprise the United States in January of 1968. And that was the focus of my year-long effort there, both on intelligence and then traveling out, spending time in the field trying to understand what had happened and so forth. And I think we were relatively successful in doing that insofar as we mapped the infiltration routes. There was not a subsequent offensive of that magnitude.
What stands out? Most [Americans] didn’t want to be there. The job I had, because I’d been trained in Vietnamese, was to interrogate some of the prisoners who were there, mostly 16- to 18-year-old kids to whom I would give a cup of tea and a Camel cigarette and we’d have a chat. And most of them were draftees in North Vietnam who didn’t really want to be there either, and had come down along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
One of the personal tragedies for me, which I’ve never talked about in public, is that my cousin was killed there in the early hours of the Tet Offensive, before I left for Vietnam. So one of the things I did, a couple of months before I left, was attend his funeral. This was all very real to a 24-year-old kid, which is what I was then. And I would say on a personal level, this was the turning point or a transformational point in my life, being in that war zone.
When you came back, the most frequent question you got was, Why did you go? And my answer was because I was drafted and because my uncles had all been in World War II, and it was a family tradition that when you got that call you went.
My sense in dealing with the South Vietnamese, which I did a fair amount of, was that they were a mixed bunch. Some were dedicated and hardworking and believed in their cause. Many were drafted into their army and were just seeking to survive.
It taught me a lot about current debates – when people, for example, in Afghanistan or in the Ukraine-Russia war, talk about “will to fight.” And I don’t think most people understand what that even means. I learned what it meant in Vietnam. The will to fight was most intense on the North Vietnamese side. There are many lessons that come out of Vietnam, and one of them is that wars like that have to be won by the people who live there, or lost by the people who live there. You can’t want a victory more than they do, and leadership is critically important. They have to respect their leaders, who are going to ask them to risk their lives in some cause that the leader defines. They did not respect their leaders in Afghanistan.
I don’t think we ever really learned the lessons of Vietnam. My sense was when Vietnam was over, there were people who wanted to think about it and write about it and so forth. But I would say the broad feeling in the U.S. military was, let’s just put this behind us.
The Cipher Brief: You put your finger on two points when it comes to lessons. One is will to fight. And that, as you say, has come up a lot in the context of the Ukraine War and perhaps explains why the Ukrainian resistance has been as powerful as it’s been. Another is clarity of mission and purpose. And I wonder on that front, to zero in on clarity of mission and purpose, to what extent do you think the United States has learned that lesson over the half century since Vietnam?
McLaughlin: I’d give us maybe a B minus on that. Clarity of mission is so critical, and I think it was clear in the early days in Afghanistan, for example, that our initial mission was to defeat the Taliban and drive out and ultimately neutralize Al-Qaeda. So from 2001 to roughly 2006, I think the mission was fairly clear in Afghanistan. And then it began to blur, once Afghan politics got more complicated, and once we had less fidelity from the Pakistanis and we got deeper and deeper into it. And I’m not sure how people would define the mission in the latter days of Afghanistan. I suppose it was to train an indigenous force that could defeat the Taliban. But again, the lesson I took from Vietnam was that it is the people who live there who have to win it or lose it, and have to understand the mission. And I don’t think the Afghan forces ever quite had the faith in their leadership or the clarity of mission to prevail as a group. I’m sure there were many exceptions to that.
In Iraq, after a while, the mission became blurred because an insurgency developed and it turned from a war of decapitation in the case of Saddam [Hussein] and his regime into a war of insurgency. And as a number of intelligence officers warned, a prolonged occupation will almost inevitably produce a recoil, a fight back, an insurgency of some sort. There are exceptions. The occupation of Japan after the war was brilliantly carried out under the leadership of [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur, but that was in a condition of complete surrender in a very different kind of war. I wouldn’t say we’ve learned that lesson real well.
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The Cipher Brief: There’s a constituency right now in U.S. politics that would rule out many issues around the world as not being in the United States interest – it’s not our fight. Is that related to the Vietnam lessons at all – that the U.S. should steer clear of foreign engagement?
McLaughlin: I think it’s overlearning it to say that we should pull back from things and avoid engagement – because there are successful engagements. Think of the 1990 war in which George H.W. Bush successfully liberated Kuwait. There was a case where the mission was clear. The mission was not to change Iraq totally, but it was to do exactly that, liberate Kuwait from an illegal occupation and stop there. So again, clarity of mission is possible. It’s more possible when you are in charge and initiating the activity, as George H.W. Bush was in that case.
There are a lot of other lessons that come out of Vietnam. Listen to your intelligence officers. You don’t necessarily have to believe everything they tell you, but around the time of Tet, which was the turning point in the war, and after Tet, people who went and looked closely said, this is not going to work out. I actually talked to [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger at one point about this and asked, What took you so long to end the war? And he said, Well, remember there were 400,000 Americans there when we arrived in office. And we’d never lost a war. So we wanted to find a way to end it honorably. One could argue with that, as people do.
The point is, don’t underestimate the adversary just because they seem to be less powerful than you. They have the will to fight perhaps.
But also study your history. Most people thought that the Vietnamese would not attack on Tet because it was a religious holiday, but dig into the history. They had done exactly the same thing in 1789 when they were being occupied by the Chinese. They attacked on Tet.
The Cipher Brief: April 30th, 1975, was the day when the North Vietnamese took over the country. What were your thoughts that day? Had you seen it coming?
McLaughlin: I happened to be in a store buying tires for my car, and I was watching television. And when I saw that happening, people going up the ladder of a chopper on the [U.S. Embassy] roof, I can’t say that I foresaw that, except that I did in the sense that I assumed ultimately the North Vietnamese would prevail, that they would overwhelm the South largely on the basis of will to fight. And that’s what happened.
I still think that America went in with a noble purpose, which was to ensure that freedom would prevail. But you have to also put it in the context of the Cold War. This was the high Cold War, and the fact that the Russians and the Chinese were to one degree or another supporting the North Vietnamese had a powerful impact on American policymakers. Back then, America and many allies viewed the world through the prism of competition with the Soviet Union and less so with China.
To a degree the purpose I think was noble. But in retrospect, unrealistic. I don’t think it was ultimately winnable. We could still learn a lot from Vietnam. And people are still trying.
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