SEVENTEEN
AS STATED IN EARLIER CHAPTERS, the Bay of Pigs operation mounted by the CIA against Castro and Cuba failed because of the cancellation of the air strike that Kennedy had ordered to destroy the final three combat-capable aircraft in the Cuban air force.
Here is an example of the failure of an administration to understand the employment of military power. This time the failure involved conventional equipment. On January 27, 1963, a report in the Los Angeles Times by Marvin Miles contained key information from an important member of the Kennedy administration:
The discussion whether United States air cover was planned for the Bay of Pigs invasion is academic, in our opinion, whereas U.S. failure to properly assess the fighting capabilities of the T-33 jet trainer has serious implications.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy acknowledged last week that underestimating the T-bird was a major mistake.
“We underestimated what a T-33 carrying rockets could do,” he said. “It wasn’t given sufficient thought. They caused us a great deal of trouble. ”
This article is evidence that by January 1963, the Kennedys had realized that the cancellation of that crucial air strike was the major miscalculation behind the defeat of the exile brigade, just as Gen. Maxwell Taylor had reported to them. As Robert Kennedy said in the same article, “The plans and the recommendations obviously were not adequate.” The Kennedy brothers agreed that they would not lay themselves open to that problem of underestimating enemy capability again.
But far away, on the other side of the world, Indochina, with all of its pitfalls, was looming over Camelot at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
By mid-1961, the Kennedys realized that the mysteries of a national military strategy that was clouded by the reality of the H-bomb was as much a factor, in the theater of operations in Indochina, as the T-33 jets had been in the Bay of Pigs operation. In other words, any participation in a military action in a friendly Third World country was necessarily limited to the use of conventional weaponry. At the same time, military strategists know that war must always be an all-out, go-for-broke activity.
A war, by definition, cannot be limited. Furthermore, if limited warfare is attempted, it inevitably becomes a war without an objective. Such a war cannot be won, as we learned in Korea and would learn in Vietnam. Thus, as Clark Clifford so clearly predicted, a war in Vietnam, fought as it was without a military objective, had to lead nowhere. Kennedy knew that the introduction of U.S. military forces into Vietnam would create that insoluble problem. Despite this understanding, the low-level action Kennedy inherited in Indochina from the Truman and Eisenhower administrations existed, and the CIA continued in operational control there as it had since 1945, although now in a somewhat more diversified and obscure role.
By the end of 1961 President Kennedy’s military adviser in the White House, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, had visited Vietnam and had rendered an important report on conditions there. The President accepted most of the Taylor recommendations, with the exception of his call for the introduction of U.S. ground forces “to help the Diem government with flood relief.”
Also by the end of 1961, John McCone, appointed to replace Allen Dulles as the director of central intelligence, had been to Indochina and around the world on a most highly specialized orientation trip orchestrated by one of the CIA’s best, Desmond Fitzgerald.
At the same time, it became quite clear to those most active in promoting military activity in Indochina that President Kennedy was not going to accept proposals to introduce U.S. armed forces into Vietnam for military purposes but that he might approve their use as advisers in a limited partnership with Diem’s government. First, however, he wanted to learn more about conditions there.
Since most of Kennedy’s advisers came from academic backgrounds, they were interested in learning more about the Vietnamese, their lives, and their traditional government. With two thousand years of cultural and political history Indochina—and particularly that part called Vietnam—was a “traditionalist society.” Its basic economic way of life was simple and efficient, sustained as it was by agriculture and fishing.
One of its most remarkable characteristics was that its peasant communities were cohesive social units that easily managed the behavior of their inhabitants. This social structure was based upon the clan, or “Toc,” which consisted of all persons, male and female, of a common ancestry through the male line going back to the fifth ascending generation and forward to the third descending generation. This represented a total of nine generations and a time span of two hundred years or more.
Such a clan was headed by the senior male of the principal lineage, and his home served as its headquarters. The clan was sustained by the “cult of ancestors,” and rites took place in an ancestral hall. As can be imagined, these clans were closely knit and generally remained in the same area century after century. They were quite isolated, and other than the payment of a head tax and a requirement of limited military service, they had very little contact with any central government.
These rice-growing peasants rarely traveled far from their own village, and most personal contact was with members of their own clan. With the exception of Saigon in the south, Hanoi in the north, and Hue, the old Imperial capital, near the middle, few places in Vietnam could have been considered to be urban. These clusters of families and clans constituted self-contained units of social conservatism that were strongly resistant to external influences. Yet, in their quiet way they set the tone of the war. They had no use for outsiders.
At this time, the total population of Vietnam was approximately 30 million, with 14 million in the south. Of those in the south, about a million and a half were Chinese, and more than a million were recent “refugees,” or invaders from the north. These northern Vietnamese were neither welcomed by nor well assimilated among southern clans. The southern Vietnamese recognized these invaders, who were mostly of the Catholic faith, by their more Mongoloid or Chinese features. But this was not the problem.
Shortly after establishing the South Vietnamese government under the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States transported this enormous tide of northern refugees into the south. Diem was from a Mandarin background and from central Vietnam. He was a staunch Catholic who had been an exile in the United States and Europe under the sponsorship of the Catholic church for many years. A brother, Monseigneur Ngo Dinh Thuc, was the archbishop of Hue and the head of a Catholic clergy of two thousand, including four bishops who served in the provincial regions. This meant that President Diem and his government were much closer to the northern “invaders” than to the southern villagers and landowners.
This influx of over one million northern Catholics was, without question, one of the most inflammatory causes of hostility throughout South Vietnam, as the CIA and its allies intended it to be. The stable, nonmobile natives of the south were overwhelmed by these new arrivals, whom the Diem government favored and had settled on their land, into their established way of life and inflexible economic system.
Almost from the start of his regime, in 1955, Diem initiated land-reform measures by issuing new land ordinances. By means of magnanimous-sounding actions, the traditional landowners were required to declare their uncultivated land; if they failed to bring any unused holdings into production, the government would seize the land and use it for the settlement of refugees from the north. In this manner Diem “legally” acquired an enormous amount of land for the actual resettlement of more than half a million “invaders.” Such actions made no friends for Diem in the south and became the basis for much of the violent rioting, called “insurgency,” that developed in later years.
By 1959 Diem had instituted another idea. He set up “Agrovilles,” which were intended to be semirural communities in which all families could enjoy the amenities of the town and still have their basic garden property. This is an old idea; in fact, one of the underlying, unstated objectives of the thirty-year war in Indochina was to bring about the breakup of this ancient and traditional communal style of living.
The Agroville concept was a failure, primarily because of the continuing friction caused by the burden of the million-plus refugees. Then there was a new development. A plan for the “pacification” of the southernmost region of Vietnam, the Mekong Delta, was proposed to Diem in November 1961, just after General Taylor had left Saigon and returned to Washington.
It was sponsored by R.G.K. Thompson, a British civil servant who had come to Saigon from the position of permanent secretary of defense in Malaya. Diem had issued a request for experienced third-party (non-U. S. and non-Vietnamese) officials to assist him with counterinsurgency problems. Thompson came as part of the British Advisory Mission to Saigon. He began by laying out a plan for the “pacification” of the Mekong Delta region.
“Pacification” is a word that has an ominous meaning in some quarters. Although it may be confused with “pacify” (that is, to calm) or “pacifism” (that is, opposition to war), this is not what it meant in Indochina. There it had taken on a deadly meaning.
“Pacification” became a term drenched in blood. Borrowed from the French commandos in Algeria by U.S. Army Special Forces activists, it meant to hit an area as hard as possible in order that it would be reduced to rubble—that is, “pacified.” “Pacification” became the battle cry of the dreaded Phoenix program that was operated under the direction of the CIA in later years.
Thompson may not have had that in mind when he sold the idea to Diem, but the Englishman, who had plenty of experience with pacification in the years of rebellion in Malaya, preached a program that could go either way. Thompson traveled to Washington and gave briefings, attended by this author, on the subjects of: (a) British methods of putting down the rebellion in Malaya and (b) his plan for the pacification of the Mekong Delta by the creation of Strategic Hamlets. These discussions were highly confidential. They centered on basic issues and matters of fundamental concern to the Vietnamese.
There has been a Malthusian movement, concealed at all times from the public, to uproot and destroy the existing and traditional system of communal society in many parts of the world. The activists of this movement fear the strength of the peasant and the ways of peasant life. They much prefer a society of dependent consumers. Indochina and Korea were their prime targets during the post-World War II decades.
Around the world and from ages past, “the peasantry consists of small agricultural producers who with the help of simple equipment and the labor of their families produce mainly for their own consumption and for the fulfillment of obligations to the holders of political and economic power.”1
This means that there were two opposite views with respect to the development of Strategic Hamlets. To some, they were an attempt to permit the indigenous population to return to a way of life that had been interrupted by World War II. To others, they were places where the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the north could be settled, or where the residents of certain embattled southern areas could be protected from their local enemies, somewhat in the style of the old Indian palisades of early American times.
At the same time, there was another movement in Asia, little noticed in the West, that supported the concept of the “commune,” or independent village. Mao Tse-tung had come to power in China in 1949 and had adapted Marxism to Chinese conditions by placing the peasantry, rather than the urban proletariat, in the revolutionary vanguard. This was why so many world leaders feared Mao and his work. Then, in 1957, he launched the “Great Leap Forward.” This revolutionary concept, actually a step backward in time, was an unsuccessful attempt to decentralize the economy, chiefly by establishing a nationwide system of people’s communes. This move flew in the face of Soviet communism, which—despite its Orwellian name—was actually an anticommune system, or a commune-annihilator system.
The play of this strange mix of ideas was not lost on the various members of the Kennedy administration. Thompson’s briefings were well attended and hotly discussed. From the start, it was made clear that Thompson’s charter would be limited to matters of “civic action” (another new term, developed from the World War II program of “Civil Affairs and Military Government”), which became a buzzword in Vietnam.
This Orwellian play on words had much to do with the way war-making policy developed in Vietnam. Whereas “civic action” meant just that when used in the context of Thompson’s proposal, in other areas of the vast Pentagon universe “civic action” had been adopted by the army’s Special Warfare section as an increment of what it called “unconventional warfare.”
In Thompson’s basic plan, the main governmental aim of the Strategic Hamlet program would be to offer an attractive and constructive alternative to Communist appeals. As noted above, the very choice of words assured that his concept would be received quite differently by various groups and interests.
Thompson’s strategy, taken from his successful campaign in Malaya, was what he called “clear and hold” operations. An area would be cleared of opposition—that is, “pacified”—and then, as the Strategic Hamlet, held safely, and the natives would be allowed to return to their normal ways. The object of the Strategic Hamlet, as he proposed it, was to protect the villagers.
President Diem bought this British proposal, and it was, on the whole, enthusiastically received in Washington. A plan entitled “A Strategic Hamlet Concept for South Vietnam,” drawn up in the State Department, was well received by General Taylor and presented to President Kennedy. It was at this time that the term “oil spot” entered the military vocabulary. This new concept not only espoused “clear and hold” operations but optimistically proposed that once an area had been cleared and held by the construction of a Stragic Hamlet, the pacified area would expand, like an oil spot on calm water. These new concepts moved forward, and before long everyone on the Vietnamese “desks” was talking “Strategic Hamlets,” “oil spots,” and “clear and hold.” Then Gen. Lionel C. McGarr, the senior army man in Saigon, decided to move ahead with a “test area” where he could establish this new type of “pacification infrastructure.”
By that time, early 1962, Diem saw Strategic Hamlets as a national program in which he could install his ambitious brother Ngo Dinh Nhu as the central figure. He had been assured by that time that the U.S. government would provide the financial support needed, along with U.S. military “advisers.” Up until this time, during the seventeen years of U.S. support of the conflict, any U.S. military personnel sent to Vietnam had been placed under the operational control of the CIA, with the exception of those assigned to the regular MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group). As these new “advisers” came upon the scene in Vietnam, their tactic seemed to be “close with and destroy the enemy.” The distinction between this approach and the Thompson concept, which had been approved by the President, became an important factor as the years marched on.
Meanwhile, there were many within the Kennedy administration who began to doubt the advisability of continuing blind support of the Diem regime. Diem made little effort to make his government more popular, and unrest among the people, particularly because of the burden of the 1,100,000 northern refugees, kept the pot boiling.
John Kenneth Galbraith, then ambassador to India and prone to exercise his writing skills on any subject, wrote to his friend, the President: “In my completely considered view . . . Diem will not reform either administratively or politically in any effective way. That is because he cannot. It is politically naive to expect it. He senses that he cannot let power go because he would be thrown out.”
Despite the fact that such thoughts were common among administration officials, the McGarr test program, “Operation Sunrise,” was launched in Binh Duong Province on March 22, 1962. The “clear and hold” aspects of the tactical situation were understood, but when it was learned that a new Strategic Hamlet was to be constructed, the whole project came to a halt.
Diem saw Strategic Hamlets as a means to institute basic democracy in Vietnam, where nothing like that had ever existed before. And he added his own Eastern flavor to the concept: “Through the Strategic Hamlet program the government intends to give back to the hamlet [read “commune” in Mao Tse-tung’s model] the right of self-government, with its own charter and system of community law. This will realize the ideals of the constitution on a local scale which the people can understand.”
To underscore how different Diem’s concept was from that of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, we need to see a line from the Pentagon: “The Strategic Hamlet program promises solid benefits, and may well be the vital key to success of the pacification program.”
Assistant Secretary of State Averell Harriman added to the weight of these issues: “The government of Vietnam has finally developed, and is now acting upon, an effective strategic concept.”
The under secretary of state, George Ball, commented “on the progressive development of strategic hamlets throughout South Vietnam as a method of combating insurgency and as a means of bringing the entire nation under control of the government.”
And the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, added: “The Strategic Hamlet program was the backbone of President Diem’s program countering subversion directed against his state.”
Nothing could underscore more clearly the conflict that existed on the two sides of the ocean. Diem saw the institution of “basic democracy,” “self-government,” and “community law.” Everyone on the other side of the Pacific was talking about warfare of one kind or another. “Strategic Hamlets” had entered the Orwellian world of “pacification.” In a strange and unique way, they symbolized the essential ideological difference between “the West” and “communism” as expressed in the “Cold War.”
The new program at Binh Duong got off to a bad start. Only seventy families could be persuaded to volunteer for resettlement, a sign that those families were most likely northern Catholic refugees. Other people were herded forcibly into the hamlet, but they were supposed to have been paid for their former land and for their labor in building this new Strategic Hamlet. In this first hamlet alone, $300,000, provided through the U.S. mission in Saigon never reached the families. (One thing we must realize about the Vietnam War is that it created many illicit millionaires.)
By the time the hamlet was settled, it was discovered that most of the military-age males had disappeared. Startling figures reveal what this Strategic Hamlet program really was. First, there was the massive forced movement of more than one million northern Catholics to the south. This disrupted northern families and overburdened the south. Second, the Strategic Hamlet program further disrupted millions of southerners. These planned, insidious programs, so characteristic of the very roots of the Cold War itself, did as much to destabilize Indochina as the warfare that they caused. Although communism or the threat of communism was the usual excuse for the escalation of the war, the real “subversion” and “rioting” were directly related to these mass movements of a once-stable and immobile population from the north and its enormous impact upon the equally stable and settled people of the south.
In February 1963, a report was given to the President that was drawn to appear cautiously optimistic. It was based upon the expectation that all of the materials needed to complete the Strategic Hamlet program would be delivered during the year and that it was nothing more than the slow delivery of materials that had been delaying the success of the program.
In fact, there was little basis for this optimism. There is no way that such a revolutionary program could have been forced upon these ancient, land-oriented people, who had been uprooted from their ancestral plots and thrust, forcibly, into these new hamlets, whether or not the area around them was hospitable to them, to their traditional society, and to their farming methods.
Many considered these new hamlets to be the equivalent of concentration camps. Whereas they were planned as safe havens for the residents to help them protect themselves from raiding parties of starving hordes—then called “the Vietcong”—they actually became prisons for the inhabitants, who dared not leave these hamlets because of pressure from the government.
Knowing what we do now about the Strategic Hamlets, the million Tonkinese “refugees,” and all the rest of the Saigon Military Mission’s make-war mission from the CIA, it is staggering to realize that by September 2, 1963, Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could write, in a memorandum to the President: “Finally, progress continues with the strategic hamlet program. The latest Government of Vietnam figures indicate that 8,227 of the planned 10,592 hamlets had been completed; 76 percent, or 9,563,370 of the rural population, are now in these hamlets.”
The government provided food in vast quantities, medicine, and small-arms ammunition for the inhabitants of these Strategic Hamlets. Because of the enormous number of starving, homeless people wandering around the country, it was inevitable that they would direct their attacks at these well-supplied hamlets. It got so bad that the new hamlet residents would have to leave the hamlet at night as swarms of bandits pillaged these government stockpiles. They were afraid to live there because they were unable to withstand the ever-present threats from the outside.
Diem’s idea of “pacification,” with its “new democracy” and other benefits, never had a chance. Meanwhile, his brother Nhu began emphasizing government control of the peasantry, at the expense of “pacification” as it was understood in Washington. By this stage, the Kennedy administration had begun to experience serious doubts as to whether the Diem government was “winning the war,” or even capable of doing so . . . on these terms and against that form of “close-in” opposition.
Keep in mind that it is difficult to think back to the Vietnam situation of 1961 and 1962 in terms of what we saw in Vietnam between 1965 and 1975. In 1962, what we now call the Vietnam War was a relatively low level paramilitary activity. All of the combat that in any way involved U.S. armed forces and U.S. personnel was a result of the “advisory” role approved by the President.
To certain military observers, it may have been safe to say that the war was going well, and even safe to predict a time when Diem’s forces—with strong U.S. support—would be victorious. On the other hand, there was so much poor planning, corruption, and alienation of the native, indigenous peasants that it appeared there was no way Diem could win and that a Diem-controlled government would be a serious handicap. By the end of 1962, this latter position prevailed in the White House and even in some areas of the Pentagon and State Department.
As the reader will recall from an earlier chapter, helicopters were introduced by the CIA into Vietnam in December 1960. Between December 1960 and March 1963, more than $2 billion in U.S. assistance had been sent in support of the Diem government. By March 1963 the number of U.S. armed forces “advisers” in Vietnam had been increased to 12,000, and there had been sixty-two American deaths.
Up to March 1963, twenty of the helicopters in action in Vietnam had been destroyed by enemy fire, and sixty helicopters had been destroyed as a result of mechanical trouble; twenty-five of the sixty-two Americans who had died there had been killed in helicopter action.
March 1963 was a turning point in this long warfare in Vietnam. During that month the rules of engagement were officially modified to permit Americans to fire at the enemy if they felt themselves “endangered,” without having to wait to receive enemy fire. As President Kennedy said at that time, “We are engaged in a civil conflict and a battle with communism.”
He had dispatched “advisers” to Vietnam, but he fully recognized the reality of the situation and the position they were in.
Faced with the ambiguities of this situation and the misunderstandings of each other on both sides of the Pacific, by 1963 there arose a feeling within the Kennedy administration that the war should be turned over to Ngo Dinh Diem entirely; or, failing that, that Diem should be replaced. By midsummer 1963, Diem had become more intractable, and the latter view dominated.
During an interview with Walter Cronkite that was broadcast by the CBS television network on the evening of September 2, 1963, President Kennedy said: “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the Communists.”
During the broadcast the President made another comment that most Americans seem to have forgotten: “What, of course, makes Americans somewhat impatient is that after carrying this load for eighteen years, we are glad to get counsel, but we would like a little more assistance, real assistance.”
These are very significant statements. Kennedy was saying, as John Foster Dulles had said in 1953, that Americans have been actively involved in Vietnam since 1945. But things were different then: In 1945, Vietnam had just been freed from Japanese wartime control; in 1945, Ho Chi Minh had declared the independence of a new Democratic Republic of Vietnam; in 1945 there was no government and no country of South Vietnam. The thought that the people of a place called South Vietnam in 1963 had the capability to win a war of independence by themselves was preposterous then as it was when President Eisenhower first proposed the idea in January 1954.
It was in this uncertain atmosphere that the next summer of crises erupted in Vietnam. On May 8, 1963, a mass meeting was held in Hue, the ancient imperial capital of Vietnam, to commemorate Buddha’s birthday. The government saw this demonstration as a challenge, and the Catholic deputy province chief ordered his troops to fire on the mob. Nine people were killed, and many were injured. The following day, in Hue, more than ten thousand people demonstrated in protest of the killings. On May 10 a manifesto was delivered by the Buddhists to the government in Saigon, and on May 30 about 350 Buddhist monks demonstrated in front of the National Assembly in Saigon.
Then, as feelings rose to a fever pitch, Madame Nhu, by now “the Dragon Lady” in the press of the world, exacerbated the problem by announcing that the Buddhists were infiltrated by Communists. Three days later, the press was alerted to be at a main downtown intersection at noon. On June 11, they were horrified to witness the first immolation suicide of a Buddhist monk in protest of Diem’s treatment of his people. Thich Quang Duc’s shocking death alarmed the world and electrified Vietnam.
Shortly after midnight on August 21, Ngo Dinh Nhu’s U.S.-trained Special Forces shock troops, along with combat police, invaded Buddhist pagodas in Saigon, Hue, and other coastal cities and arrested hundreds of Buddhist monks. Nhu had decided to eliminate Buddhist opposition in his own way. More than fourteen hundred Buddhists, primarily monks, were arrested, and many of them were injured.
At the same time, President Kennedy had dispatched a new ambassador, the veteran Henry Cabot Lodge, to Saigon. After a brief stop in Tokyo, Lodge arrived in Saigon at 9:30 P.M. on August 22, 1963. This date marked the beginning of the most explosive and ominous ninety days in modern U.S. history.
On November 1, 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu were killed. On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy died. On that date, November 22, 1963, the government of the United States was taken over by a superpower group that wanted an escalation of the warfare in Indochina and a continuing military buildup for generations to come. Within a few days after the assassination, the trends and policies of the Kennedy administration had started to be changed by the new Johnson administration to assure the achievement of these goals. The warfare in Vietnam would go on to become a major military disaster—but at a good price: no less than $500 billion in total expenses.
Why did this happen? What had created all the pressure? Why was John F. Kennedy killed?
Around the time Henry Cabot Lodge arrived in Saigon, certain Vietnamese generals began talking with U.S./CIA contacts to determine what the reaction might be to a military coup d’état against the Diem regime. In particular, they were opposed to Ngo Dinh Diem’s brother, Nhu, who was the head of the Strategic Hamlet program, and his wife.
Nhu had developed and controlled the CIA-trained Vietnamese Special Forces and had handpicked the generals who commanded the military units around Saigon. None of the plotters wished to attack that strength. Ambassador Lodge sent a message to Washington noting the disaffection with the Diem regime, and particularly with the Nhus, but underscoring that the Saigon generals were still strongly with the Diems.
At about this same time, Adm. Harry Felt, the commander in chief of the Pacific Command, called Washington in support of a strong stand against the Nhus, both Diem’s brother and his outspoken wife. Admiral Felt, the senior military commander in the Pacific, was not directly responsible for activities in Vietnam because of the dominant CIA role there. Nevertheless, he followed all developments closely and had his own eyes and ears on the scene.
Shortly after the admiral’s call to Washington, this author was called to Hawaii. After a long introductory discussion with Admiral Felt, I was asked to sit at a table in his office as members of his staff brought stacks of intelligence messages in for analysis.
I worked in his office for the entire week, reviewed hundreds of messages and letters, and had many talks with the admiral and his staff. He was vitally concerned with the intelligence situation. He believed that intelligence gathering in Vietnam was very bad and that commanders, both Vietnamese and American, were being forced to make decisions without sufficient military information and without knowing what the actual situation was. This was particularly true at that time. There was much controversy over the status of the actual military situation throughout the country. There was dissatisfaction over Nhu’s deplorable attacks on the Buddhists. There were rumors of the possibility of the overthrow of Diem and his government, or at least the overthrow of the Nhus.
At the same time, as the U.S. government debated the pros and cons of getting rid of Diem and his brother, there was another unusual development. It became necessary to meet with leaders of the various factions who would support a coup. Such meetings had to be held secretly for the protection of all parties. Certain CIA agents were selected to attend the meetings. One of the men designated for this delicate responsibility was one of the most enigmatic characters of the thirty-year war: Lucien Conein.
Conein was serving in Vietnam in 1963 as a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. He was not actually in the U.S. Army, but was a CIA agent assigned to Indochina under the notional cover of a military officer. Conein, born in France, had been educated in the United States. During World War II his duties with the OSS took him to China, where he worked with U.S. Army major general Gallagher, who operated with the nationalist leader of Indochina, Ho Chi Minh.
At the time of the Japanese surrender, it became necessary to fill the vacuum of leadership in Indochina, particularly in Hanoi, for the purpose of rounding up the Japanese troops still there and providing a rallying point for the people of Indochina, who had been under French colonization and later the Japanese occupation. General Gallagher was sent to Hanoi for this purpose and took with him Ho Chi Minh, Col. Vo Nguyen Giap, and the French-speaking Conein. This was 1945.
In early 1954, when Allen Dulles created the Saigon Military Mission for the purpose of infiltrating CIA agents into Indochina under the cover of the U.S. military, he chose his most experienced Far East agent, Edward G. Lansdale, to be in charge of that unit. Among those on the SMM team was Lucien Conein. While Lansdale spent most of his time that year in Saigon with the fledgling Diem administration, Conein was in Hanoi at the same time working against his old associates, Ho Chi Minh and General Giap.
The scope of the activities of the SMM, and of Lansdale and Conein, had been enlarged to include the mounting of “dirty tricks” against the Vietminh, who were led by Ho Chi Minh, and at times against the French. It has always seemed rather strange that the same man who had arrived in Indochina with Ho Chi Minh should have been the one sent back to Hanoi to employ his clandestine skills against the same Ho Chi Minh. Questions have arisen: Did the SMM really work against the Vietminh, or did it work against the French? And why?
At the same time, of course, the SMM was actively instigating the movement of the more than one million Tonkinese to the south.
All of this took place between 1954 and 1963. This same Lucien Conein, who had been designated as the go-between for the anti-Diem plotters—principally Gen. Duong Van Minh and newly installed U.S. ambassador Lodge—had since 1945 been one of the most important agents of the OSS and later the CIA in the Far East. His orders came from that agency. In 1963, nearly twenty years after arriving in Hanoi, he was being employed to encourage the apparatus being formed to eliminate Diem—the man whom the CIA had installed as leader of the new government of the south. This certainly raises a number of questions.
Why did the U.S. government, in 1945, before the end of World War II, choose to arm and equip Ho Chi Minh? Why did the United States, a few short years later, shift its allegiance from Ho Chi Minh to the French in their losing struggle that ended ignominiously with the battle of Dien Bien Phu? Why, after creating the Diem government in 1954 and after supporting that new government for ten years, did the United States shift again and encourage those Vietnamese who planned to overthrow it? And finally, why, after creating an enormous military force in Indochina, did the U.S. government fail to go ahead and defeat this same Ho Chi Minh when, by all traditional standards of warfare, it possessed the means to do so? The answers to these and related questions remain buried in closed files, along with so much other information of that time period.
Negotiations leading to the overthrow of Diem, particularly to the elimination of the Nhus, continued through August 1963 but were not conclusive. An August 31 message from Ambassador Lodge, however, came close to outlining the series of events that became the approved plan.
It had become clear that the war could not be won with the Diem regime in power in Saigon, that the Vietnamese people were not with him. But these conclusions failed to consider the impact of the one-million-plus Tonkinese Catholic “refugees” on the people of South Vietnam and of Diem’s callous disregard for the welfare of the indigenous population. U.S. officials never seemed able to understand why the situation, political and military, was much worse in the far south, the Mekong Delta region, than it was in the north and central regions. After all, if the Vietminh in the north were behind the Vietcong enemy in the south, how did it happen that the people farthest from North Vietnam were the most hostile to the Diem government and those nearest to the North Vietnamese the most peaceful? The answer never surfaced. Most of the one-million-plus refugees had been dumped into the southern districts south of Saigon. That was the simple, undeniable, and most volatile reason. They had become the “insurgents” and the fodder for the insatiable war machine.
Under the burden of these and other questions, President Kennedy set up a train of events that became vitally important and that revealed his own views and his future plans for Vietnam. In the aftermath of the showing of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, there were many top columnists, among others, who attempted to have the American public believe that the Kennedy administration had not produced any substantive body of historical fact concerning his plans for Vietnam. They were wrong—dead wrong. It is very interesting to speculate on why these columnists all “circled wagons” with their untenable stories even before JFK had been shown in the theaters. What is the source of their common bond?
In response to their contrived questions and to bring to light the facts of the matter, I shall present selected information from the public record and from personal experience. A recently published (1991) book, the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961—63, volume 4, by the Government Printing Office, specifically covers “Vietnam, August—December 1963.” This book contains the record of frequent meetings, studies, messages, and travels to and from Saigon by top U.S. officials at the White House, the Department of State, and the Defense Department during that period. These meetings often included Kennedy, McNamara, Rusk, General Taylor, and other high-level administration officials.
At that time my boss was Gen. Victor H. Krulak. He was assigned to the Joint Staff and worked closely with General Taylor and President Kennedy. A review of the above source book will reveal that he was involved in as many as thirty such meetings, messages, and trips on the subject of the future course of the U.S. government in Vietnam. Krulak and I worked closely, and I was involved in much of the preparation of this developing policy. A fact that I recall clearly was that Kennedy was the driving force of these meetings and the “idea man” behind the policy.
Because Kennedy attended a number of these meetings, it will be seen, quite readily, that he was deeply involved in Vietnam planning from 1961 until his death and that the climax of this work came between August and late November 1963. Chief among these records is the Kennedy-generated National Security Action Memorandum #263 of October 11, 1963, which was developed as a result of the McNamara and Taylor trip to Vietnam during September.
First, the President dispatched General Krulak to Vietnam so that he would be completely up-to-date on matters there, with the purpose of Krulak’s writing a “Trip Report” that would contain the new Kennedy policy and any last-minute items that the general would be able to pick up that might not have been apparent to JFK during the last round of meetings in Washington.
Accompanying Krulak was a senior Foreign Service officer, Joseph Mendenhall. What most people in Washington had not noticed was that of all the senior officers in the Pentagon at that time, Krulak had become the one closest to Bobby Kennedy, and through him, to the President. This was not only an official closeness; it was also personal. They understood one another and could work together.
Krulak and Mendenhall made a whirlwind four-day tour of Vietnam and returned with views so opposite from each other’s that during the NSC meeting of September 10, President Kennedy asked, “You two did visit the same country, didn’t you?” This kind of public small talk about their trip concealed the real significance of what Krulak actually had been asked to accomplish for the President—which unfolded with the next decisions from the White House.
Shortly thereafter, Kennedy announced that he was sending Secretary McNamara and General Taylor, at that time the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on another fact-finding mission to Vietnam. Ambassador Lodge did not like the idea, but the President was adamant. The trip was announced on September 21. The two men left on September 23 and were back in Washington on October 2, with a massive report for the President.
On September 29, McNamara, Taylor, Gen. Paul Harkins, Lodge, and Admiral Felt had met with President Ngo Dinh Diem. The next day, most of them had met privately with the Vietnamese vice president, Nguyen Ngoc Tho. Tho was able to inform them about the failure of the Strategic Hamlet program and of the broad-based peasant disaffection with the Diem government. These were the last top-level meetings with President Diem, and from that day forward his days in Saigon were numbered. The decision to remove him had been made. But it had been planned to take effect quite differently than has generally been reported.
McNamara and Taylor left Saigon and returned to Honolulu for a oneday stop “to prepare their report.” This was an interesting ingredient of such an official, top-level trip. They had spent a lot of time traveling; they had met people on an unbroken schedule all day long and into the night. And yet, when they returned to Washington, they stepped off the helicopter onto the White House lawn, carrying a huge, leather-bound, fully illustrated official report to the President containing all that they had done during the trip—a report written in one day, during their spare time. Could this be true?
It seems impossible; yet it happened then, and it has happened on other occasions. Let’s see how this magic is performed.
When Krulak was sent to Saigon, the President knew that he would come home with all the current data essential for final decision making. But the President wanted to move the decision level up to the top. Therefore, he sent McNamara. While McNamara and Taylor were touring Vietnam, the President, Bobby Kennedy, and General Krulak were setting down the outline of their report—aided by frequent contact with McNamara in Saigon via “back-channel” communications of the highest secrecy—which would contain precisely the major items desired by the President, in the manner in which he wanted them. This report was written and produced in the Pentagon by Krulak and members of his SACSA staff, including this author.
Krulak is a brilliant man and an excellent writer. He set up a unit in his office to write this report. Teams of secretaries worked around the clock. The report was filled with maps and illustrations. It was put together and bound in leather and had gold-leaf lettering for President Kennedy. As soon as it was completed, it was flown to Hawaii to McNamara and Taylor so that they might study it during their eight-hour flight to Washington and present it to the President as they stepped out of the helicopter onto the White House lawn.
The Government Printing Office history text Vietnam: August—December 1963 includes a brief note about this “Trip Report”:
10. Final Report.
1. ) Must be completed before return to Washington.
2. ) Guides for report are proposed outline prepared by General Krulak and master list of questions consolidated by Mr. Bundy.
3. ) To maximum extent, report will be worked out in Saigon. Layover in Honolulu is scheduled for completion of report.
Let no one be misled: This is simply the public record. That McNamara-Taylor report to Kennedy of October 2, 1963, was, in fact, Kennedy’s own production. It contained what he believed and what he planned to do to end the Vietnam problem. More important, this Kennedy statement on Vietnam was the first and major plank in his platform for reelection in 1964. This was one of the rising pressure points that led to the decision to assassinate him. A Kennedy reelection could not be permitted.
This report, entitled “Memorandum for the President, Subject: Report of McNamara-Taylor Mission to South Vietnam,” and the decisions that it produced played a most important part in the lives of Diem and his brother, in those of President Kennedy and his brother, and in those of the American public because of events that it set in motion. Some of the report’s most significant items were:
[The Vietnamese were to] . . . complete the military campaign in the Northern and Central areas (I, II, and III Corps) by the end of 1964, and in the Delta (IV Corps) by the end of 1965 . . . to include a consolidation of the Strategic Hamlet program.
. . . train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.
. . . the Defense Department should announce in the very near future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 military personnel by the end of 1963.
Then, revealing the President’s plan to remove the Diems from power:
. . . MAP and CIA support for designated units, now under Colonel Tung’s control . . . will be . . . transferred to the field. [Col. Le Quang Tung led the CIA-trained Saigon Special Forces loyal to Nhu. This deflated Tung’s power.]
This is a Vietnamese war and the country and the war must, in the end, be run solely by the Vietnamese.
With this report in hand, President Kennedy had what he wanted. It contained the essence of decisions he had to make. He had to get reelected to finish programs set in motion during his first term; he had to get Americans out of Vietnam. And he had to make a positive and comprehensive move early in order to accomplish both of these goals.
To achieve his ends, he send Krulak to Saigon first and then followed this with the “official” McNamara and Taylor visit. All of this was made formal with the issuance of National Security Action Memorandum #263 of October 11, 1963, particularly that section that decreed the implementation of “plans to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963. ”
Plans continued for the removal—but not the death—of Diem and his brother. Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu had left Saigon on September 9 to attend the Inter-Parliamentary Union meeting in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, with plans to extend the trip to Europe and the United States. With the intercession of the Vatican and the papal delegate in Saigon, Diem’s brother, Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, traveled to Rome.
These detailed plans carefully included arrangements for the departure of President Diem and his brother by commercial airliner from Saigon for Europe. This was the most delicate part of the removal plan. The two men actually were driven to the Tan Son Nhut airport, in Saigon, and boarded the [Super-Constellation] plane waiting for them. Then, for some totally unexplained and unaccountable reason, President Diem and his brother turned and left the plane while the few witting Americans on the scene looked on, stunned by their action.
The brothers hurried back to their limousine, which had not yet pulled away from the airport ramp, entered it, and drove back into Saigon and to the Presidential Palace at high speed. There they found themselves alone. Their longtime household and palace guards had fled as soon as they realized that Diem and his brother Nhu had gone. Without them, they were all marked men.
The brothers were alone. They had no troops at their call. All anyone in the government knew was that they were going on a trip. There was no fighting, as would have been normal had the plotters made a move against Diem.
This is how their removal was planned, and this is how close it came to success. But they had returned to an empty palace.
The stark realization struck Diem and his brother: They were alone and deserted in a hostile environment. A tunnel had been dug, for just such purposes, from the palace and under the river to Cholon. They ran through the tunnel to what they thought would be safety and ended up in the hands of their enemies. They were thrown into a small military van, and en route to some unknown destination, they were murdered.