In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

CIA People Policies (73]
I wanted Nick Kohler to help get the task force started, then go
to Lusaka and maintain contact with Savimbi in the Angolan base
camps. Nick was twenty-seven, fit, rugged, and had a military background:
two combat tours as a Special Forces officer in Vietnam, a
CIA tour in Vietnam, where I had known him, where he had worked
sixteen hours a day and stayed out of trouble. Savimbi should take
to him. Nick was a rugby enthusiast,. and Savimbi had played second
row w bile a student in Portugal.
Nick had finished his CIA Vietnam tour in November 1974. When
I got back in May 1975, he had rushed up to me in the hall, his blue
eyes snapping, his squared shoulders radiating physical power and
drive. He was dressed in a sharp pink and grey suit with flared
trousers and a hint of safari in the lapel and pockets, and three-inch
wooden-heeled shoes on which he stood almost to six feet, my height.
I had smiled, remembering his personnel file, which I'd read in
Saigon in July 1973 on my way upcountry. Six-feet-one, the biographic
sheet had said, and when I'd met him I immediately registered
the exaggeration. When I got to know him better I realized he
had doubtlessly seen to it that the file made him seem bigger than
he was. In the same way, he bullshitted us about his investments.
This thread of blarney in his character did not greatly offend me; it
was a common enough trait among case officers. I had smiled again
when I remembered our confrontation over his dress upcountrywhen
I had ordered him to stop wearing his bathing suit and shower
shoes to the sweltering, upcountry office. Now he looked like a page
out of Esquire. In short order he had told me that he was preparing
for an assignment to Kinshasa, that he was juggling two girl friends,
and playing around on the side, and that he had made first string on
Washington's best rugby team. He had been practicing his chess and
tennis, hoping to beat me, and was studying French full time, determined
to make a "3" by the end of the course. We went drinking that
night in Georgetown.
Potts wouldn't accept Nick Kohler and he wouldn't tell me why.
In frustration I asked a branch chief and he told me, "Potts thinks
Nick is too young."
The same day I bumped into Sam Hilton in the hallway in front
of Potts's office. Hilton had been a staff officer of the Saigon station.
He was over fifty and genial, but lazy. You got your business done
in his office before five o'clock or not at all.