Komer, R.W. (Robert William), 1922-2000

In one study, he stated with confidence that precisely 68 percent of South Vietnam's 17.4 million people were ''relatively secure.'' In another, he said that as ''slow, painful and incredibly expensive though it may be, we're beginning to 'win' the war.''

Working closely with William E. Colby, the top man for the C.I.A. in Vietnam, Mr. Komer led a village-by-village effort to win hearts and minds. The pacification program evolved into a more tough-minded project called Operation Phoenix. Conceived by the White House and supported by the C.I.A., Phoenix sought to expose Vietcong agents who were working in South Vietnam. Mr. Colby later testified that Phoenix killed 20,587 Vietnamese.

In October 1968, Mr. Johnson named Mr. Komer ambassador to Turkey. His tenure was short. President Nixon took office in January 1969 and replaced him.

Mr. Komer then worked as a consultant with the Rand Corporation, writing classified studies on NATO and on the need for a rapid-deployment force for the Persian Gulf, until the next Democratic administration.

He became undersecretary of defense for policy under President Carter and put many of those ideas into effect. His staff presented him with a bronzed blowtorch, a symbol of his past battles.

Mr. Komer was born in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard in 1942, served in the Army in World War II and, after having graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Business in 1947, joined the new C.I.A. He became a senior intelligence analyst, peering into nations from Morocco to Malaysia.

After leaving the Pentagon and in the clear light of hindsight, he waxed bittersweet about Vietnam. ''I would have done a lot of things differently and been more cautious about getting us involved,'' he said. He called the war ''a strategic disaster which cost us 57,000 lives and a half trillion dollars.''

Mr. Komer's first marriage, to Jane Komer, ended in divorce. His second wife, Geraldine, died in 1996. Survivors include three children from the first marriage, Doug, of Annandale, Va.; Dick, of Falls Church, Va.; and Anne, of Boston; a sister; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Robert William Komer, American government official and diplomat (born Feb. 23, 1922, Chicago, Ill.—died April 9, 2000, Arlington, Va.), served during the Vietnam War as Pres. Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant in charge of the U.S. government’s controversial “pacification” program to disseminate propaganda in South Vietnam and identify Vietcong agents working in the country. An army veteran who had served in World War II, Komer joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, rising to become a senior intelligence analyst before moving to the National Security Council under Pres. John F. Kennedy in 1961. He remained on the staff after Johnson took office and became one of the president’s closest advisers. Komer’s work in Vietnam lasted from 1966 to 1968; years later he called the war “a strategic disaster.” After the war, he served as an ambassador to Turkey and as undersecretary for defense policy in the Carter administration.

Robert Komer, sometimes known as "Blowtorch Bob", was one of the hardest of the hard men from America's lost war in Vietnam. A junior second world war intelligence officer turned CIA professional, Komer, who has died aged 78, was President Lyndon Johnson's first choice to supervise non-military programmes in Vietnam from the White House. But, in May 1967, he was sent to Saigon to drive forward the programmes euphemistically known as "pacification", "nation-building" and "revolutionary development".

High-minded as the intention might have been - to match communist propaganda with a western revolution of freedom - the CIA programmes earned a reputation for dirty tricks, assassination and torture. To quote the grim jest of the time, Komer set out to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people, but ended up acting on the premise that if you grabbed their balls, their hearts and minds would follow.

A single-minded and ruthless bureaucrat, he was responsible for what he himself, translating the Vietnamese phrase phung hoang, called the Phoenix programme. This was an effort to collect systematic information on the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front, the political organisation that controlled the Vietcong guerrillas.

In theory, it was supposed to identify political cadres, tax collectors and local officials, who would then be "neutralised" by South Vietnamese police or army units. Neutralisation was supposed to mean internment; in practice, many reporters and historians have suggested that it too often meant murder, either in firefights in Vietcong controlled villages, or in straight assassinations.

The programme depended for its information on a sinister system of interrogation centres in each of South Vietnam's 44 provinces, places with an unsavoury reputation for brutality and torture. It has been claimed, that as many as 40,000 real or suspected Vietcong were killed in the course of Phoenix. The figure is almost certainly inflated; but the inflation was itself the result of a system that grossly exaggerated figures of enemy casualties.

Attempts have been made to exonerate the CIA from responsibility for this fiasco on the grounds that control of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development (Cords) programmes were taken from the agency at about the time Komer went to Saigon. In fact, Phoenix remained a CIA operation until it was handed over to the South Vietnamese in 1973.

William Colby, Komer's deputy and successor in charge of Phoenix, said that his boss had been "brash, abrasive, statistics-crazy and aggressively optimistic".

He was certainly very much Lyndon Johnson's man, and when, in 1968, Johnson withdrew from the US presidential election, he made sure that Komer would survive the impending debacle in Vietnam. In deference to his long-standing interest in the Middle East, Komer was appointed US ambassador to Turkey, and awarded the national medal of freedom.

Komer was born in Chicago and brought up in St Louis. Educated at Harvard, where he did a master's degree in business administration, he was awarded the Bronze Star for gallantry during the second world war, and joined the CIA when it was formed in 1947. There he earned a reputation as a gung-ho cold warrior with abounding energy and a first-class intellect. He served on the Board of National Intelligence Estimates before being moved to the national security staff at the White House.

After his return from Turkey, Komer went to work for the Rand Corporation in California. In the late 1970s, he served in President Jimmy Carter's administration, as under-secretary of defence for policy, then went back to Rand as a defence consultant.

Like his former boss, Robert McNamara, Komer developed second thoughts about the wisdom of America's involvement in south-east Asia. Interviewed in the mid-1980s, he said that with the benefit of hindsight, "I would have done a lot of things differently and been more cautious about getting us involved".

Komer's first marriage ended in divorce; his second wife, Geraldine, died in 1996.

Robert William Komer, CIA official and diplomat, born February 23 1922; died April 9 2000

Robert W. Komer, a point man in the United States' star-crossed campaign to win hearts and minds in Vietnam, died on Sunday after a stroke. He was 78 and lived in Arlington, Va.

During the war and after, Mr. Komer was known as Blowtorch Bob, a name given to him by Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador in South Vietnam who had said (in so many words) that arguing with Mr. Komer was like having a flamethrower aimed at the seat of one's pants.

Mr. Komer was indeed a man with a fierce mind behind a mild mien. With his owlish eyeglasses and briar pipe and his 15 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, he came to President Kennedy's National Security Council in 1961 as the model of what the novelist John le Carre calls an intellocrat.

In Washington, where information is power, secret information can be the means to great power. He wielded it like a weapon in Vietnam, where his job was to help win the war without firing a shot through a program known as pacification.

The idea of pacification was that the war could not be won solely with bombs and bullets. Control of the people of South Vietnam would be won from the Communists of the north village by village, hut by hut, by social and political means, with information and propoganda and the selective use of force, by South Vietnamese soldiers backed by American civilians.

In 1966, as the battle intensified, he became President Johnson's special assistant for Vietnam, in charge of the political side of the war. He later told an interviewer that he had warned Mr. Johnson that he had no experience in such matters. ''Well,'' the president replied, ''maybe what we need is some fresh meat.''

''That's what he said,'' Mr. Komer recalled. ''Not fresh blood, but fresh meat.''

In 1967, Mr. Komer arrived in Saigon with the rank of ambassador and the title of chief of pacification, on paper the No. 2 American civilian in Vietnam, second only in rank to Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. He reinforced his reputation as a man with a take-no-prisoners attitude, a deathless optimism that the war would be won, and a near-religious faith in the power of facts and statistics to help win it.

An aide to President Johnson, John P. Roche, later noted that if Mr. Komer had been asked how many Vietnamese had not been influenced by Vietcong propaganda, he would have replied ''in 13 hours and 20 minutes'' with a top secret cable for the president's eyes only ''definitively stating: 2,634,201.11.''

Mr. Komer's ''sensitive antennae were tuned to Johnson's desires,'' said a leading historian of the war, Stanley Karnow, and Mr. Komer produced a steady stream of statistics-laden reports that supported the Mr. Johnson's's vision of a light at the end of the tunnel.

In one study, he stated with confidence that precisely 68 percent of South Vietnam's 17.4 million people were ''relatively secure.'' In another, he said that as ''slow, painful and incredibly expensive though it may be, we're beginning to 'win' the war.''

Working closely with William E. Colby, the top man for the C.I.A. in Vietnam, Mr. Komer led a village-by-village effort to win hearts and minds. The pacification program evolved into a more tough-minded project called Operation Phoenix. Conceived by the White House and supported by the C.I.A., Phoenix sought to expose Vietcong agents who were working in South Vietnam. Mr. Colby later testified that Phoenix killed 20,587 Vietnamese.

In October 1968, Mr. Johnson named Mr. Komer ambassador to Turkey. His tenure was short. President Nixon took office in January 1969 and replaced him.

Mr. Komer then worked as a consultant with the Rand Corporation, writing classified studies on NATO and on the need for a rapid-deployment force for the Persian Gulf, until the next Democratic administration.

He became undersecretary of defense for policy under President Carter and put many of those ideas into effect. His staff presented him with a bronzed blowtorch, a symbol of his past battles.

Mr. Komer was born in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard in 1942, served in the Army in World War II and, after having graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Business in 1947, joined the new C.I.A. He became a senior intelligence analyst, peering into nations from Morocco to Malaysia.

After leaving the Pentagon and in the clear light of hindsight, he waxed bittersweet about Vietnam. ''I would have done a lot of things differently and been more cautious about getting us involved,'' he said. He called the war ''a strategic disaster which cost us 57,000 lives and a half trillion dollars.''

Mr. Komer's first marriage, to Jane Komer, ended in divorce. His second wife, Geraldine, died in 1996. Survivors include three children from the first marriage, Doug, of Annandale, Va.; Dick, of Falls Church, Va.; and Anne, of Boston; a sister; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Robert W. “Blowtorch Bob” Komer, 78, Army and CIA veteran sent to South Vietnam in 1967 to run the pacification program. That program, described as the battle for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, ran parallel to the U.S. military effort. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had named Komer a year earlier as a presidential assistant to energize the shooting war, also gave him the pacification post. William E. Colby, the former CIA director who worked with Komer after the war, wrote in his 1978 memoirs that Komer “was about the best thing that had happened to the Vietnam war at that date.” Colby wrote that, although many saw Komer as “brash, abrasive, statistics-crazy and aggressively optimistic,” he saw him as “quick and intelligent” and “fearless and tireless” in getting military and civilian bureaucracies to perform. Johnson rewarded Komer’s efforts by appointing him ambassador to Turkey in late 1968. Born in Chicago and reared in St. Louis, Komer earned a bachelor’s degree and MBA from Harvard and served in Army intelligence in Europe during World War II. He joined the fledgling CIA in 1947 and was later assigned to the National Security Council, where he became a trouble-shooter for the Johnson administration. Komer, who held the National Medal of Freedom, worked on Vietnam and NATO issues for the Rand Corp., both in Santa Monica and in Washington, D.C. During the Carter administration, Komer was undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon. On Sunday in Arlington, Va., of a stroke.

Robert William "Blowtorch Bob" Komer (February 23, 1922 – April 9, 2000) was a key figure in the pacification effort to win South Vietnamese "hearts and minds" during the Vietnam War, heading Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support.
Early life and education
Born in Chicago, Illinois but raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Komer graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School, served in World War II and joined the Central Intelligence Agency in its infancy in 1947.[1]

Career
Komer served on the staff of the National Security Council, which was led by McGeorge Bundy. After Bundy's departure, Komer briefly succeeded Bundy as interim National Security Advisor, before he was assigned to the Vietnam pacification campaign.

While with the NSC, Komer and others negotiated with Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol a memorandum of understanding (MOU) about Israeli nuclear capabilities. The March 10, 1965, MOU, variously interpreted since, said 'Israel would not be the first country to "introduce" nuclear weapons to the Middle East'.[2]

Komer arrived in South Vietnam in May 1967 as the first head of the newly created Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program, the most controversial aspect of which was the Phoenix program, which William Colby later testified resulted in 20,587 deaths.[3] CORDS was an agency with a staff of both civilians and military personnel, but it fell under the authority of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson had sent Komer to South Vietnam to provide impetus to the nation-building efforts of the new organization. Komer was known for his brusque management style, which had endeared him to the president and earned him the nickname "blowtorch Bob" from U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr..[4] As head of CORDS, he commanded all pacification personnel in South Vietnam.[5]

However, the problems CORDS faced were intractable and the results of Komer's work ambiguous. In a revealing discussion with military historians,[6] Komer said "everybody and nobody" was responsible for counter-insurgency against the communist Vietcong guerrillas. He said it "fell between stools which accounted for the prolonged failure to push things on a large scale even though many correctly analyzed the need". Komer focused his work on the expansion of village militias loyal to the South Vietnamese government, believing they could provide local security against guerrillas.[7]

Komer left South Vietnam in 1968 upon being appointed ambassador to Turkey, and he was succeeded as head of CORDS by William E. Colby, who would later become head of the CIA. Komer also later worked as a consultant at the Rand Corporation and in the Jimmy Carter administration as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.[8]

Ambassador Komer has left a special mark in Turkish history: on January 6, 1969, at the beginning of his tenure as the US ambassador to Turkey, his car was set on fire in Middle East Technical University[9] by a group of students who then formed the core of the Marxist-Leninist movement in Turkey under the banner of Dev-Genç. Komer was visiting the campus at the invitation of university president Kemal Kurdas, who relied on American donors to finance the building of the modern campus.

In the 1980s, Komer became a vocal critic of "The Maritime Strategy", which was devised by Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. Komer argued against spending the resources for 600 ships, part of a controversial plan to deter and contain the Soviet Union.

Personal life
Robert Komer married Jane and later divorced her. He later married Geraldine.[8]

Awards and honors
On December 23, 1967, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon Johnson.

Death and legacy
Komer died on April 9, 2000.[8]