B. Hugh Tovar, OSS in China and Laos
Abstract
Bernardo Hugh Tovar was born on December 27, 1922 in Bogota, Columbia. His father was Columbian and his mother Irish. His family moved to Chicago in 1924, but his family frequently visited Columbia in his early youth. As a result he grew up bilingual. He attended Portsmouth Priory School in Rhode Island (1941), before attending Harvard, where he also learned French. His ROTC class was called to active duty in June 1943, though he was awarded a degree in 1944 because he passed his comprehensive exams. He graduated as a second lieutenant. After various assignments and training in Infantry, Artillery and Communications, he was selected to join the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1945. He was flown to Kunming, China, and was active in the search for prisoners of war held by the Japanese forces in various parts of Asia. In late 1945 he parachuted into Vientiane in French Indochina to try and keep the French from re-entering the region (unsuccessfully). In September the OSS was disbanded, and he returned to Illinois, taking up graduate studies in political science and economics at Northwestern. Though he knew of the OSS’s successor organization, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he accepted a position with Sears, Roebuck, and Co. to open new operations in Latin America. But the CIA came calling again, and he accepted a position in Manila in 1950, traveling there with his wife and one-year-old son. He served in posts in Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1960s, Laos, and Thailand in the 1970s, retiring from the CIA in 1978. He served as an advisor, scholar, and resource for many years thereafter.
Copyright
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Interviewer, Editor – Paul Hillmer
Bernardo Hugh Tovar was born on December 27, 1922 in Bogota, Columbia. His father was Columbian and hismo olumbia in his early youth. As a result he grew up bilingual. He attended Portsmouth Priory School in Rhode Island (1941), before attending Harvard, where he also learned French. His ROTC class was called to active duty in June 1943, though he was awarded a degree in 1944 because he passed his comprehensive exams. He graduated as a second lieutenant. After various assignments and training in Infantry, Artillery and Communications, he was selected to join the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1945. He was flown to Kunming, China, and was active in the search for prisoners of war held by the Japanese forces in various parts of Asia. In late 1945 he parachuted into Vientiane in French Indochina to try and keep the French from re-entering the region (unsuccessfully). In September the OSS was disbanded, and he returned to Illinois, taking up graduate studies in political science and economics at Northwestern. Though he knew of the OSS’s successor organization, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he accepted a position with Sears, Roebuck, and Co. to open new operations in Latin America. But the CIA came calling again, and he accepted a position in Manila in 1950, traveling there with his wife and one-year-old son. He served in posts in Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1960s, Laos, and Thailand in the 1970s, retiring from the CIA in 1978. He served as an advisor, scholar, and resource for many years thereafter.
Interviewer’s note: I was very kindly connected to Mr. Tovar by his friend and colleague, General John W. Vessey, who served along side him in Laos. Our conversation took place over the phone on two successive nights. A third conversation to clarify a few points occurred on July 27, 2009. There were occasional problems with our phone connection that made a few passages throughout the interviews difficult to decipher. Mr. Tovar helped clarify some of these passages, but some remain indecipherable, at least to me. Small talk at the beginning and ending of both phone calls has been redacted from this transcript.
OK. Well, let's just talk about … I have your notes. They were wonderful notes.
Well, thank you. Let's just go ahead and talk about where you were born and raised and educated and things that sort of pushed you in the career trajectory that you ended up with.
OK. Well, I was born in 1922 in Bogota, Columbia, South America. My father was Columbian and my mother was Irish from Chicago. And I grew up mostly in Chicago, but I went back and forth. I had a number of trips down there and went down there for a year to learn Spanish in 1937, '38. And my mother insisted that we learn Spanish. I did pretty well on that, but then back up here and I didn't go back after then for years. I went to school—I went to boarding school in my early years. Then I went to prep school in Rhode Island at Portsmouth Priory school then, a Benedictine school. And then, I went to Harvard and I went into the Army before I graduated, but I graduated after I was in the Army. A little hard to explain. I was in the ROTC. And I was eventually commissioned at Fort Sill as a second lieutenant for field artillery. And let's see, then I was in the Army, you know, in the artillery for a couple years and then OSS reached out and grabbed me and brought me into the field there. And why, I don't know. Maybe because I was young and, you know, a whippersnap and I could go anywhere and do anything. And they gave me a little more training and sent me off to China. And from China, because I spoke French, I spoke schoolboy French, they sent me down to Indochina in a parachute and I ended up in Vientiane in late '45 and got my first direct involvement in what became later on the Indochina War.
Yes, indeed. I didn't realize you were there so early.
Oh, yeah. No, I had lots of good stories from the 1945 period.
Well, please tell as many as you'd like. [Laughs]
They really aren't relevant to my (***) now, but I did have a—you know, I got my feet wet in it and then was interested in it, but never thought of going back there again. But finally I went. I was sent some and was initially discharged from the Army and I went back to Illinois—I was living in Lake Forest, Illinois then and decided to go to graduate school. Oh, I forgot to say that in about—whenI was in the Army, somewhere in OCS, I guess, I got a letter, my mother called me and said I had a letter from Harvard saying that I had graduated in February of 1944. So that was nice to know, but I didn't really care because I didn't—I didn't think I'd finished and I had planned to go back afterward. But after I got out of the Army, I went home and decided to stay there and go to graduate school in Illinois. I went to Northwestern for a year or two. I didn't get a degree there because I got sort of fed up with my—the head of my department. Kenneth Colgrove—I don't know if you ever knew him.
No.
Well, he was the head of the department, you know, the international relations at Northwestern. He was a fine gentleman and all that, but we didn't see eye to eye and he was no help to me. He didn't give me any sort of advice what I should do with an MA and all that. So, I said the heck with it. Meanwhile, I was getting soundings from Washington because they—the National Security Act of 1947 had been passed. And the CIA was formed, established. And they invited me down there to come to work. So I thought it over and went back down there. This was in '48 that I went—mid '48. Let's see. [Pauses] And then it took awhile before I passed all the barriers they have and in August of '48 I signed up, you know, in CIA from then on, for the next 30 years.
My goodness. Now, if you don't mind me taking you back to Vientiane in 1945 for just a minute. Was this after the Japanese had been defeated that you first arrived or were they still occupying at that time?
Well, I arrived in China before that, but before I went to Laos they had been—they had surrendered and I was sent down on a POW rescue mission. There were rescue missions going on in China and I was only one of, I think, two in Indochina. And we didn't know what the Japanese we going to do because we weren't sure how—whether they knew about or—and/or accepted the surrender. And some didn't up in north. But my Japanese were like fine young men. They did exactly what Itold them to do. I had n o problem with them at all.
And just—well, what was Vientiane like in 1945?
领英推è
Well, it was very delightful little, sleepy little town. And the people that I met there were very, very nice. When I landed in by parachute, I bounced off the airstrip and ended up in the mud. And a very sort of messy situation there. And I was sort of pulling my—tried to help me up. And looked up and it was a very—a young man who was from Vientiane. He was a Lao and he said he was the mayor of Vientiane—Chao Meuong as they called him. So, that was a nice beginning.
Indeed.
And Vientiane itself was—the French were already coming back in. The British were bringing them back in. And some are coming in by parachute on British aircraft. And they were trying to get themselves established again in Laos. My boss then was a Major Aaron Bank, who later became one of the sort of co-founders of the Special Forces. A pretty tough guy who had—his instructions were, to us, as conveyed to us, under the Potsdam agreement, the Chinese would occupy Indochina—or Laos and Vietnam down to the—what, the 15th or 16th parallel, I forget which. And the French were not to come back in. So we are to tell the French they are not—they didn't get back in. So, he, you know, he —let us be with him, confronted the French being brought in from Thailand by the British. And there were very nasty confrontations with French who were determined to get back in. The British wanted them to get back in. And—can you hear me?
Yes. . .
Well, anyway, that was the essence of our situation here. The Lao we met in Vientiane, all the key people there—the—I can't think of all their names right off the hand, but the ones who were, in effect, in charge and half the Japanese sort of bugged out, were very, very—French educated, very nice people, but they didn't want the French back in. Some of them were connected with the—what do they call them—the Lao Issara.
Yes, with Phetsah Phetsarath?
Yeah, and they were very Francophile in many—in a true sense, but they said they didn't want them to come back. They wanted to be independent. Well, I—to make a long story short—my boss called me in—he didn't call me. We were all there together. He said, ‘Look, I'm sending you down to Savannakhet in the south.’ He said, ‘I'm going to Hanoi tomorrow to see Ho Chi Minh.’
Oh, my.
Which threw me a bit. I didn't know what that meant. But he sent me down there because I could manage in French and I had a Chinese captain who was in our jump team and he spoke good French, but no English, and he spoke all the other local languages. So, he and I were going to go down there and tell the French, ‘No, you can't come in.’ But I had met some of the British who were involved in the southern operation, too, and so I dealt with them all at the time. And they insisted that we let the French go in. ‘In Savannakhet,’ I said, ‘my orders are you must not come in. I cannot agree to you coming in.’ And for a while there, you know, for a week or two, it was all right. The French didn't go in. I forget how long I was there, but maybe a couple weeks, but the French stayed out. I mean, I was just talking to a French colonel. Here I'm a second lieutenant telling him that you stay the hell out of this place. You don't belong here. You know, it was sort of an ironic situation. But it was OK and then it broke down, not on my part, but when Major Bank had gone to Hanoi, he left the rest of the group under his deputy and major—also a major, but not a very bright one. And they let them in a place a Thakhek, which is more or less midway between Savannakhet and Vientiane. And I don't know why they ended up there, but they were doing the same thing I was doing—telling the Vietnamese—or telling the French they could not come in. Well, the Vietnamese were very strong—the Viet Minh—in the Thakhek area. They were in my area, too. But they didn't bother—they didn't cause me any trouble down there. But they did up in Thakhek. And the British major who was in—sort of leading the French into Thakhek began to push them very hard and say, ‘Look, I'm Major Kemp of the Eighth (***) and these French officers are with me and they are to come in.’ And the Viet Minh told them very bluntly that if, ‘You can come in any time. But if a Frenchman comes in, we're going to kill him.’ Well, about two or three days later they did just that. He—Kemp brought them in and they stopped him at the edge of the Mekong. And he tried to bluster and go through by pure bravado. And they killed the French officer, which was a very unpleasant thing because they felt that our people who were right there nearby could have stopped it and did nothing to stop it. And all hell broke loose between Kunming and Kandi, Ceylon [Allied Headquarters for Southeast Asia]; Paris and London and Washington as they, in effect, were being—our people were being blamed for the murder of the Frenchman. So, not long after that were—sent message via the Thai side of the border to get the heck out of there. And we did, finally. But after I left, the French went in and the shooting began in Savannakhet as it did in Thakhek, too. So it was a very unpleasant situation. It was not really the fault of our people there. But the French saw it differently, and I guess Washington didn't want to argue and said, ‘Get the hell out.’ Which we did.
My goodness. So, when …
It's been written about quite a bit by Arthur Dommen, whom I'm sure you know.
Oh, yes.
Arthur Dommen was a good friend. He and I don't always agree—before he died, but he's an excellent guy. He's the best man on Indochina that I've come into contact with. But he felt that our team should have—either should not have been there or if had been there, they should have kept them from happening. He's right—I forget where to refer to you—and Peter Kemp, the British major there has also written on it. So, it's become a very emotional issue. And we people have set out of it except that I've talked about it when I've had occasion to bring up the subject.
Sure.
As we're doing now. Was that take—is that enough for early Laos?
REMAINDER OF THE INTERVIEW