FIVE
IT WAS January 8, 1954. Dwight Eisenhower had been President of the United States for one year and was presiding over a meeting of the National Security Council with twenty-seven top-echelon national security advisers in attendance. When the subject turned to U.S. objectives and courses of action with respect to Southeast Asia, the President—our foremost World War II military commander—said, as recorded at the time, “with vehemence”:
The key to winning this war is to get the Vietnamese to fight. There is just no sense in even talking about United States forces replacing the French in Indochina. If we did so, the Vietnamese could be expected to transfer their hatred of the French to us. I cannot tell you how bitterly opposed I am to such a course of action. This war in Indochina would absorb our troops by divisions!1
It must be added here that one of the great weaknesses in the approach to South Vietnam taken by the United States in those early days was an oversight that continues to this day. It has been the failure to recognize that the piece of real estate historically known as Cochin China but that we call South Vietnam was not, and never has been, a sovereign nation-state. It has never truly governed itself, despite the fact that Indochina has a history of thousands of years. This significant failure of perception made all attempts at “Vietnamization,” while the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to the north was held by Ho Chi Minh, little more than words. A new country was being created and being asked to fight a major war, both at the same time. That was impossible, as we learned too late.
At the time of Eisenhower’s comment, the indeterminate region of “South” Vietnam was under French military control, and the French army was at war with Ho Chi Minh and his “Vietminh” government. During that period and under those conditions, there was no way that the Vietnamese of the south, without a government, without leadership, and without an army, could have fought for their independence against the Democratic Government of Vietnam, which we ourselves had armed so well after World War II.
Eisenhower made a powerful and correct statement of policy, but he seriously overlooked these basic facts of Vietnamese history. Eisenhower wanted “to get the Vietnamese to fight” their war for their own country. He wanted to “Vietnamize” the war. President John F. Kennedy made essentially the same statement nine years later when he issued one of the most important documents of his administration—National Security Action Memorandum #263—of October 11, 1963, saying that the Vietnamese should take over “essential functions now performed by U.S. military personnel . . . by the end of 1965,” thereby releasing all U.S. personnel from further duty in Vietnam.
By 1963, the people of South Vietnam had a little more experience with self-government than they did in 1954; but with the death of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu on November 2, 1963, even that small beginning suffered a serious setback. South Vietnam had never had the tradition of being a nation. Most of its rural populace had no concept of, or allegiance to, a government in Saigon, other than memories of the one hundred years of French rule, which they loathed.
This serious oversight was not limited to Eisenhower and Kennedy. In an extract from his book Counsel to the President, which first appeared as “Annals of Government: The Vietnam Years” in The New Yorker magazine in May 1991, former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford makes many similar remarks. He has written: “ . . . our objectives in Vietnam depended more on the capabilities of our allies in Saigon than on our own efforts.” There was no one closer to the policy and thinking of our six “Vietnam era” presidents and their key advisers than Clifford. All of these presidents, three Democrats and three Republicans, made two serious mistakes in their Vietnam policy:
1. They seriously overestimated the ability and character of this either nonexistent or very new Diem government of South Vietnam, and
2. Perhaps the most serious oversight of all was that not one of these six presidents ever stated a positive American military objective of that war. The generals sent to Saigon were told not to let the “Communists” take over Vietnam, period. This does not constitute a military objective.
Clifford asked himself those questions when he wrote: “First, can a military victory be won? And, second, what do we have if we do win?” These are meaningful questions, especially coming from the man who served as secretary of defense under President Lyndon Johnson in 1968.
What Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy meant in their comments is clear enough under conventional circumstances, but their views made little sense given that the South Vietnamese were not a nation. Even when Ngo Dinh Diem had been established as the president of South Vietnam, in 1954, he had no governmental structure, no armed forces, no police, no tax system, etc. We aided Diem. We aided his subordinates. We armed and fed his troops—whoever they were. We provided billions of dollars in aid, but doing all those things does not make a government that can stand on its own feet in the face of a skilled and dedicated adversary that wanted to create a free Vietnam.
Ngo Dinh Diem was himself part of the problem. Perhaps Lyndon Johnson said it best, in 1961, during an interview in Saigon with Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History: “Shit, Diem’s the only boy we got out there.” Diem had been born in 1901 in the village of Phu Cam. He was not a native of Cochin China, but was from the vicinity of Hue. He was a Catholic, a staunch nationalist, and an anti-Communist.
In 1933, he had been minister of the interior in the Bao Dai government under French colonialism. After the Japanese had been defeated in 1945 and driven from Indochina, Diem was active against the French. In 1950 he left Vietnam for exile in the United States and lived at the Maryknoll Seminary in New Jersey, where, among other things, he washed dishes.
Then, on May 7, 1953, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York arranged for a luncheon visit to the U.S. Supreme Court Building and introduced Ngo Dinh Diem to Justice William O. Douglas, Sen. John F. Kennedy, Sen. Mike Mansfield, Mr. Newton of the American Friends Service Committee, Mr. Costello of the Columbia Broadcasting System, and Edmund Gullion and Gene Gregory of the Department of State. There Ngo Dinh Diem discussed Indochina for about an hour and answered questions, chiefly from Douglas and Kennedy. Diem had been introduced to this distinguished group as a “Catholic Vietnamese Nationalist.” An account of this important luncheon meeting is to be found in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, vol. 13.
With reference to President Eisenhower’s comment before the National Security Council on January 8, 1954, relative to “[getting] the Vietnamese to fight,” it may be noted that during this May 7, 1953, meeting Ngo Dinh Diem himself may have initiated that theme. According to the official account, “He thought that the French military understood the problem better than the French civil government. In any case, the French could not beat the Communists and would have to rely on the Vietnamese to do it. They could not get the Vietnamese to undertake the task, however, unless the Viets had more freedom.”
At no time did Diem, or anyone else, suggest what could be done to arrange for “the Viets [to have] more freedom.”
Diem left the United States in 1953 and continued his exile from Vietnam in a Benedictine monastery in Belgium. On June 18, 1954, Bao Dai asked Diem to become premier in his government. Diem arrived in Saigon on June 26, 1954, met Lansdale on June 27, and formally assumed that office on July 7, 1954. After an election campaign carefully orchestrated by the CIA and Lansdale, Diem became president of South Vietnam on October 1954.
Another thing we must remember is that we had been aiding the French from 1946 up until their defeat by the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. In other words, we had been helping the enemy of the South Vietnamese people right up until a few months before we installed Ngo Dinh Diem as the new president of this previously nonexistent country. It seems strange that President Eisenhower would want to “Vietnamize” the war in January 1954, six months before the new government, under Ngo Dinh Diem, had been established and during a period when we were still aiding the French. Such factors had a great impact upon the actions of this emerging country during the period of the Vietnam War.
This oversight, not only on the part of Eisenhower and Kennedy, but also on the part of most Americans, seriously handicapped both countries during the thirty years of American support of the Vietnamese and their warfare in that piece of real estate. Something had to be done to create a viable government and to coalesce the populace before it could act on its own behalf. This is where all of our best intentions failed so badly. Even in America, more than a century and a half elapsed between the landings at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock and the battle with the redcoats in Lexington and Concord. During that time those early settlers evolved into Americans, and were not simply an aggregate of English, German, Irish, and French people.
Despite this critical oversight, that was the commander in chief speaking during that important National Security Council meeting of January 1954 to the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the individual chiefs of each of the military services, among others. That was his policy.
President Eisenhower could not have expressed his views on the subject of a “Vietnam War” more forcefully. He knew that we did not belong there. Yet less than a month later, on January 29, 1954, many of the same officials who had been at that meeting, including the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of central intelligence, ignored the President and made plans to get on with the business of making war in Indochina.
In the words of Dr. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace at Kansas State University:2
We have dropped more bombs on Indochina than all the [other] targets in the whole of human history put together. . . .
Indochina contains enough bomb craters to occupy an area greater than Connecticut’s 5,000 square miles. . . . We have released more than 100 million pounds of chemical herbicides over more than 4 million acres. . . .
Two American medical doctors estimate that South Vietnam [alone] has suffered 4 million casualties. . . .
In the south, Vietnam was under French control simply because there was nothing else for that area. The French used Bao Dai as their puppet-in-command; but he reigned from the Riviera and was seldom in Vietnam. Finally, in mid-1954, when the United States took the initiative to install Ngo Dinh Diem as president of the newly established country of South Vietnam (i.e., south of the 17th parallel), that piece of real estate began to have a government, at least in name.
Diem had no congress, no army, no police, no tax system—nothing that is essential to the existence of a nation. At the same time he had a strong, skilled, and experienced enemy—Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese army. For this reason, many of the requests made upon the Diem government during the period from 1954 to 1963 were quite unrealistic. But this fact never seemed to occur to the leaders of our own government or to those who tried to carry out liaison with Diem’s government, as though it were, and had been, an equal member of the family of nations. We shall see this problem arise throughout the decade that followed.
Lest there are still some among us who believe that the President runs this country, that the Congress participates effectively in determining the course of its destiny, and that the Supreme Court assures compliance with the Constitution and all federal laws, let them witness this action, and the results of this blatant disregard for all elements of government, as we find it on the record.
Among those at the January 8, 1954, meeting of the National Security Council, when the President made his views known so forcefully, was Allen W. Dulles, director of central intelligence and brother of the secretary of state. There was no way that Allen Dulles could have misunderstood those words of President Eisenhower’s. There was no way that any of the others at that meeting could have misunderstood or have had any question whatsoever about “how bitterly opposed” the President was to placing U.S. troops in Indochina. But this is not how things work when modern underground warfare is involved. This is not how the CIA and its counterpart, the Soviet KGB, have waged their worldwide invisible wars. Nothing whatsoever has ever deterred them from the essential business of making war.
These are incredible men, these defiers of presidents. One might say that they do not need them. Ambassador George V. Allen, after a state dinner with John Foster Dulles, said, “Dulles spoke as if he had his own line to God and was getting his instructions from a very high source.”3
Allen Dulles was also a lawyer and a partner with Sullivan & Cromwell. The brothers were in touch with the power elite, and a mere President influenced them not at all. So many qualified people who have worked “close to the seat of power”—men like Winston Churchill, R. Buckminster Fuller, Prof. Joseph Needham and Ambassador Allen—confirm that these so-called leaders get their instructions from a very high source. These “leaders” are all fine actors, and certainly not true rulers, as we witness in the example of this National Security Council meeting of January 1954. This is true not only in the world of politics but is equally true of banking, industry, academia, and religion.
This explains why so many of the visible activists in high places are lawyers. In that profession they are trained to work under the direction of their clients. They have been educated for such service in the higher universities, many of them with courses designed for just such purposes. And they are further trained in the major international law firms that make a business of providing many of their skilled “partners” for top-level government service, for directorships on bank boards, and for major industrial positions.
In the case of Vietnam, the course followed by the U.S. government was established by these two international Wall Street lawyers, John Foster Dulles and Allen Welch Dulles, among other, more invisible powers. A review of the record of the early days of the war in Vietnam will reveal how they did it.
On January 14, 1954, only six days after the President’s “vehement” statement against the entry of U.S. armed forces in Indochina, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said: “Despite everything that we do, there remained a possibility that the French position in Indochina would collapse. If this happened and the French were thrown out, it would, of course, become the responsibility of the victorious Vietminh to set up a government and maintain order in Vietnam.”
The secretary added:
[I do] not believe that in this contingency this country [the United States] would simply say, “Too bad; we’re licked and that’s the end of it.”
If we could carry on effective guerrilla operations against this new Vietminh government, we should be able to make as much trouble for this government [the Vietminh-formed Democratic Republic of Vietnam] as they had made for our side and against the legitimate governments of the Associated States4 in recent years. Moreover, the costs would be relatively low. Accordingly, an opportunity will be open to us in Southeast Asia even if the French are finally defeated by the Communists. We can raise hell and the Communists will find it just as expensive to resist as we are now finding it.
What John Foster Dulles said exposed the method used to circumvent the views of the President about the introduction of U.S. forces: first, by ignoring him completely, and, second, by changing the words from “making war” to “raising hell” with “guerrilla operations.” Note also that Dulles assumed, as we all did, that there would be some government in existence in the south that could take care of itself and its people.
This is how American intervention and direct involvement in the Vietnam War began—in opposition to the words of the President and in compliance with the longer-range Grand Strategy of the power elite. After all, we had been arming all sides in Indochina since 1945. According to a record of the January 14, 1954, National Security Council meeting, it was: “b. Agreed that the Director of Central Intelligence [Allen Dulles], in collaboration with other appropriate departments and agencies should develop plans, as suggested by the Secretary of State [John Foster Dulles], for certain contingencies in Indochina.”
Two weeks later, on January 29, the President’s Special Committee on Indochina5 met to discuss these plans developed by the director of central intelligence. During this meeting, it was agreed that he could add “an unconventional-warfare officer, specifically Colonel Lansdale,” to the group of five liaison officers that had been accepted by the French commander, General Henri Navarre.
In this manner, the CIA created the Saigon Military Mission and sent it from Manila to Indochina. This “military mission,” undoubtedly the most important single “war-making” American organization established in Indochina between 1945 and 1975, was seldom in Saigon. It was not a military mission in the conventional sense, as the secretary of state had said. It was a CIA organization with a clandestine mission designed to “raise hell” with “guerrilla operations” everywhere in Indochina, a skilled terrorist organization capable of carrying out its sinister role in accordance with the Grand Strategy of those Cold War years.
By 1954, the French had created a fragile, basically fictitious government of the State of Vietnam under Emperor Bao Dai. It was said that none of the members of his Chamber of Deputies could have mustered twenty-five votes from their “constituencies.” This made the issue quite clear to the Vietnamese, even if it could be concealed from the rest of the world. Through seven years of war, the Vietnamese people’s choice was between the French and Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
The Vietnamese government that Eisenhower believed ought to be fighting the Vietminh on its own behalf did not exist in 1954. Thus, the choice of the predominant number of these Indochinese was overwhelmingly Ho Chi Minh. They felt no loyalty to Bao Dai, who lived in Paris, and they hated the French.
This was the situation when the CIA created the Saigon Military Mission on January 29, 1954. At this meeting, Allen Dulles was accompanied by his deputy, Gen. Charles P. Cabell; George Aurell, formerly chief of station in Manila; and Edward G. Lansdale. Lansdale, who had been in the Philippines since 1950, working as an agent of the CIA with Ramon Magsaysay and others to defeat President Quirino, had been ordered by the CIA to return to Washington for this series of meetings on Vietnam, preparatory to returning to Saigon to head the newly formed Saigon Military Mission. In his own book In the Midst of Wars, Lansdale says:
Dulles turned to me and said that it had been decided that I was to go to Vietnam to help the Vietnamese, much as I had helped the Filipinos. Defense officials added their confirmation of this decision.
I was to assist the Vietnamese in counterguerrilla training and to advise as necessary on governmental measures for resistance to Communist actions.
Lansdale would continue in Vietnam, as he had in the Philippines, to exploit the cover of an air force officer and to be assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) for “cover assignment” purposes. He was always an agent of the CIA, and his actual bosses were always with the CIA.
A statement made by Lansdale is quite relevant:
I had been told that I was to help the Vietnamese help themselves. As far as I knew, this still was almost impossible for an American to do. The French ran Vietnam as a colony, with a minimum of Vietnamese self-rule. Chief of State Bao Dai was in France.
It was true that France had said that Vietnam was independent, but the French issued and controlled Vietnam’s currency ran the national bank, customs, foreign affairs, armed forces, and police, and had a host of French officials placed throughout the administrative system. The French high commissioner for Vietnam was the real authority. Was the shock of Dien Bien Phu and the conference at Geneva causing a change of status? I simply didn’t know.
I had met Ed Lansdale and many of his Filipino associates in Manila in 1953—54, and we were both assigned to the Office of Special Operations in the Pentagon during the late fifties and early sixties. I have heard him speak of his serious problems with the French in Saigon, which were so severe that he thought he might be killed by them. He had similar problems with certain Vietnamese. However, his Saigon Military Mission and its tough, experienced team managed to “raise hell,” weather the storm, and present the U.S. government with a full-fledged, ready-made war by the spring of 1965.
The Saigon Military Mission entered Vietnam clandestinely to assist the Vietnamese, rather than the French. This was their “official” objective—on paper. Again it might be asked, Who did they mean by the “Vietnamese”? They had the same problem Eisenhower did. What Vietnamese government was there to help? As members of that team understood their orders, they were to wage paramilitary operations against the enemy and to carry out psychological warfare. They might not have known who their friends were, but they knew who their enemy was—the Vietminh. They also knew their job. They did not waste much time on “advisory” work or on PsyWar “Fun and Games.” They were in Vietnam for bigger game. They were a band of superterrorists.
It must be kept in mind that the SMM was a CIA activity and that when its members said they were going to promote PsyWar and propaganda they had a different concept of these things than did the military. They saw their role as promoting sabotage, subversion, labor strikes, armed uprisings, and guerrilla warfare.
Their propaganda activity included the use of radio and newspapers, leaflets delivered by the millions from converted USAF B-29 bombers, posters, slogans, exhibits, fairs, motion pictures, educational and cultural exchanges, technical exchanges, specialized advertising, and help for the people in disaster areas. They attempted to do everything possible to exploit the nationalistic feelings of the people in an attempt to unite this new country.
Another characteristic of their work was the use of paramilitary organizations. Such units are no more than a private army whose members accept some measure of discipline, have a military-type organization, and carry light weapons.
The most interesting aspect of the SMM was that its leaders were firm believers in the Little Red Book teachings of Mao Tse-tung and spread the word accordingly. That book contained the doctrine of guerrilla warfare as practiced during the Cold War. Years later, after Lansdale had come home from Vietnam, he made many speeches at the various war colleges. Almost without exception he enumerated the “three great disciplinary measures” and the “eight noteworthy points” of Mao Tse-tung’s great Chinese Eighth Route Army.
I was the pilot of U.S. Air Force heavy transport aircraft on many flights from Tokyo to Saigon via the Philippines from 1952 to 1954. When Lansdale’s team members were on board the plane during some of those five-hour flights between Manila and Saigon, we discussed the Magsaysay campaign being waged by the CIA against Quirino and the plans that were being made for a new government in Vietnam—a new government to be supported by the United States, after the French departure.
The CIA’s U-2 spy plane. President Eisenhower’s hopes for a “Crusade for Peace” were dashed when the CIA—against Ike’s specific order—sent a U-2 spy planeson a long-range overflight of the Soviet Union from Pakistan to Norway. On May 1, 1960, it made a forced landing near Sverdlovsk. Despite Soviet claims and news reports, the U-2 was not shot down. Allen Dulles himself testified to that fact before the Senate, and Eisenhower has written the true story in his memoirs. It suffered engine failure that may have been induced by a pre-planned shortage of auxiliary hydrogen fuel.
Captain Francis Gary Powers, pilot of the U-2, landed alive and well and in possession of a number of most remarkable identification items, survival kit materials, and other things spies are never allowed to carry. Did he know he had them in his parachute pack, or did someone who knew the U-2 had been prepared to fail put them there to create his “CIA spy” identity?
President Eisenhower had ordered all overflights to cease during the pre-summit conference period. The author, supporting a major CIA overflight program in Tibet, grounded all aircraft involved. Why was one U-2 ordered on its longestever overflight at that time?
Kennedy’s totally unexpected election gave him an enormous fund that had been prepackaged for the expected Nixon administration. The eventual $6.5 billion procurement of the Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX) was the largest single peacetime procurement contract of its time. A fierce controversy raged over which aircraft manufacturers would get that money. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara (lower left), with the shrewd assistance of JFK’s Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg (lower right), eventually awarded the contract to General Dynamics and Grumman, the manufacturers whose procurement plans would do the most good for the 1964 presidential campaign.
William Colby, who later became the Director, Central Intelligence, claimed before a Congressional committee that during the time he supervised the Phoenix program in Indochina, at least 60,000 Vietnamese had been killed “in cold blood” by his agents. Colby is shown holding a shotgun during a January 1969 inspection tour of a “pacified” area in Vietnam.
Helicopters were used to deliver troopers of the First Cavalry Division to the site of a raid on the “Little Iron Triangle” near Bong Son, South Vietnam. A B-52 bombing raid had already killed most of the Viet Cong in the area. Overall, in Vietnam, bomb craters destroyed the land over an area the size of the state of Connecticut.
The author writes, “There is ample evidence to show President Kennedy was killed because he was moving to end the Cold War. The Cold War was basic and essential to the support of the CIA as well as the Pentagon. It was also a necessary part of the conflict required to generate the funds for the continually expanding military-industrial complex of the world.”
A large, cleared patch of land on the fork of the river to Saigon was the site of a French Army “Gun Tower” fortification, when this photo was taken by the author in October 1953. This fortification was designed to control river traffic and to protect Saigon from guerrilla assault.
An April 1954 view of the port of Saigon, taken by the author. The shallow, muddy river was often blocked by the hulls of large ships that had been exploded by underwater mines and sunk. Saigon was, at that time, the only port in the southern half of Indochina that could handle ships of ocean-going size.
During the spring of 1954, while the French army was being destroyed by Ho Chi Minh’s forces at Dien Bien Phu, this photograph taken by the author over the French military base at Saigon shows huge stockpiles of unused American military equipment in storage.
The French were forced to surrender to the Vietminh on May 8, 1954.
Tonkinese northern Catholic refugees on their way to South Vietnam with their belongings. More than 660,000 were transported in U.S. Navy ships under the supervision of CIA’s Saigon Military Mission.
Over one million of these fixed-base, agricultural people were uprooted and moved with their skimpy belongings to South Vietnam, where they were left among the unprepared ancient people of Cochin China. They were penniless, homeless, foodless, and unwanted. Inevitably they became bandits, insurgents, and fodder for the war that came later.
The Dulles brothers and CIA’s Saigon Military Mission “raised hell” to such a degree that 1,100,000 Tonkinese left their homes in the north and were transported 1,500 miles or more to a future of uncertainty and hostility in the newly created South Vietnam, 1954-1955. Transport was by Navy ships and the CIA’s Civil Air Transport airline.
It may be noted here that although National Security Council records and Department of State records show that the Saigon Military Mission did not begin until January 1954, there were other CIA activities in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (such as the White Cloud teams) long before 1954, and some members of the SMM had participated in these earlier activities as far back as 1945. All of this was formally endorsed by the agreement to create the SMM in 1954. Although there was no real South Vietnamese government for the SMM to support during the early months of 1954, there was going to be one; the Dulles brothers would see to that.
The Saigon Military Mission was sent to Vietnam to preside over the dissolution of French colonial power and over the bursting of the Bao Dai “State of Vietnam” bubble. The Dulles brothers knew, by January 1954 if not long before that, that they would be creating a new Vietnamese government that would be neither French nor Vietminh and that this new government would then become the base for continuing the decade-old war in Indochina. That was their primary objective.6
The Dulles brothers were in a position to make sure that both the French and the Bao Dai interests were defeated. Dien Bien Phu fell on May 8, 1954. The international agreements that were signed in Geneva, Switzerland, on July 21, 1954, with both the United States and South Vietnam abstaining, restricted, on paper, all official American representation in Vietnam to those who were there then, and only for the first 300 days after the agreement was signed.
Thereafter, the introduction of arms, equipment, and personnel was prohibited, except for normal rotation of military personnel and for the replacement of items in kind. The agreement prohibited the establishment of any new military bases. This meant that the SMM had to be in place by mid-May 1955. In some respects the SMM disregarded this agreement. I flew military equipment, such as ground radars made in Italy, into Saigon during this period, when we had to paint out the original addresses and retype the manifests while the plane was in the air. We had to fly through India, and India was a member of the International Inspection Team in Saigon. At the time of the Geneva accords, the United States had delivered aid to Indochina at an original cost of $2.6 billion. (As a military planning factor, “life-of-type” follow-on support generally multiplies the original cost by a factor of ten.)
Edward G. Lansdale, chief of the SMM, arrived in Saigon from Washington via Manila on June 1, 1954, less than one month after the defeat of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. All over Vietnam, the Vietminh and other nationalist villagers were quickly consolidated in the north and other areas where they predominated. The defeated French units were disarmed, and their equipment and supplies were taken over by the Vietminh, thus increasing the Vietminh arsenal enormously. What they could not take away they destroyed. Every night, during my flights to Saigon, I could hear explosions in and around Saigon and other stronghold areas.
At times the Saigon River, the only supply channel into South Vietnam, became impassable as a result of enemy attacks and the number of ships that had been sunk in the channel. The airport at Tan Son Nhut was ringed with coils of barbed wire. Despite this precaution, the French World War II aircraft parked there were destroyed by explosions set by Vietminh sappers night after night. The entire country was seething with underground warfare.
This was the climate in which the Saigon Military Mission began operations. The Geneva accords called for a political division of the 1,600-mile-long country at the 17th parallel—roughly an equal half-and-half split, north and south. During the early months of its existence, the Saigon Military Mission reported that its first official task was “to create a refresher course in combat PsyWar. . . and Vietnamese army personnel were rushed through it.” The report was written just as though there were a South Vietnam and a South Vietnamese army—neither of which existed in any form until at least July 21, 1954. But that wasn’t exactly what the SMM was doing anyhow.
The Saigon Military Mission began operations on the ground in Indochina on June 1, 1954. Ngo Dinh Diem, the newly appointed president, arrived in Saigon on July 7, 1954. How are a new government, and a new nation, created? How does a man who has lived in exile outside of a country for years (and keep in mind the fact that South Vietnam had never been a country) come back, under the auspices of a totally foreign nation (the United States), and all of a sudden assume the role of president? Where does his government infrastructure and its people come from? Where do his police and army come from? Where does the money come from?
In other words, here was an ancient section of Asia with more than 30 million people divided over millennia into villages, regions, and loosely knit nations. Except for the ten-year-old Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which had never had an opportunity to get itself organized in peace, this entire region had no government. The French, who had provided for the constabulary, had gone. The Chinese, who for centuries had provided for the simple village economy, were frustrated and, under Diem, were being sent away. What remained was near anarchy. The fighting and rioting were actually a form of basic banditry, banditry to obtain the most basic needs of life. It was not even a civil war.
This is where the Saigon Military Mission stepped in and, in a series of adroit political moves, helped Diem gradually extend his authority in the creation of a central government. The SMM’s greatest weapon was a blank U.S. government checkbook from the CIA that enabled the mission to do, and to buy, anything.
What was done in those earliest days of 1954 set the stage for the warfare that followed over the next twenty years. During the first two and a half years of that period, no American was closer to the Diem brothers (Ngo Dinh Nhu was the head of South Vietnam’s CIA counterpart and the strongman of the new country) than Ed Lansdale. He became concerned that the Public Administration Advisory Program planned by the American embassy was going to be too slow and that something had to be done quickly to fill the void left by the French and the Vietminh, who had returned to the north after the Geneva agreements were signed, and to make Diem’s new administration effective without delay. What he recommended and what was done deserve a few words.
Lansdale called this his “Civic Action” program. He describes it as a “cycle including not only political indoctrination, physical toughening, and learning to use tools at the training camp, but a further period of service in a hamlet or village where they would help the inhabitants build schoolhouses, roads, bridges, pit latrines, and similar public works, as well as help establish self government.” This is an interesting development for an organization that had been created to go to Vietnam and “raise hell,” to use Foster Dulles’s words. Lansdale was taking a page out of his past.
Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Lansdale had joined the Office of Strategic Services. He said later that he left that organization and joined U.S. Army Intelligence. It has been my experience that few men have actually left an intelligence organization and joined the military. More likely, they have simply arranged things so that they could exploit “military” cover.
Be that as it may, during World War II, after the Italian army had surrendered, we learned that during the Fascist dictatorship the cities and towns of Italy had been so long without effective government that they needed assistance in order to reestablish some sort of local administration. The army set up units for this work, called Civil Affairs and Military Government. These CAMG units proved so successful that they continued on into the north of Europe as the Allied armies rolled into Germany.
In a little-known development, the OSS noted what was being done and quite secretly began to develop a similar capability for Asia. As you may recall, General MacArthur had not permitted the OSS to operate in the Pacific Theater. But the OSS managed to get into the Pacific with its Civil Affairs and Military Government idea via U.S. Navy channels. A special school was opened on the Princeton University campus, followed by language schools at Monterey, California. With the surrender of Japan, this program came to an abrupt end. However, certain observant people—such as Lansdale and his boss, Gen. Richard Stilwell—realized the potential for such an activity during the Cold War. In 1960, Lansdale, Gen. Sam Wilson, and I wrote much of that doctrine into the new Army Special Forces manual.
When Lansdale was sent to the Philippines in 1950, he created a Civil Affairs Office there. He had prevailed upon President Ramon Magsaysay to create a psychological-warfare division as part of his own presidential staff and then had named it the “Civil Affairs Office.” Here is no place to develop this relationship further. But it should be noted that this novel military task—if ever it really was military—began with WWII and then moved right into the Cold War under the sponsorship of the CIA.
Inevitably, Lansdale moved this concept of civil affairs to Vietnam with him. Under Gen. John W O’Daniel, the head of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), there were four staff divisions: Army, Navy, Air Force, and Pacification. Lansdale headed Pacification, which ostensibly had a civil affairs—type role. However, the Vietnamese objected violently to the word “pacification.” They well knew that it had been a most sinister French colonial practice, devised by Gen. Louis-Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey in North Africa and used later by the Chinese in Northern Indochina, meaning that a region was “pacified” when all of its people had been killed. Other parts of the civil affairs program became known as the Strategic Hamlet project of later years. And, before the war was over, the CIA had set up the Phoenix program, supposedly along civil affairs lines; actually, it became one of the most brutal and murderous creations of the war. As a result of the Phoenix program alone, tens of thousands of Vietnamese were killed.
It is necessary to understand this side of the Vietnam campaign in order to realize why we were never able to win the minds and hearts of the people and why this type of warfare did not lead to victory. It reminds us again of the days of the British East India Company and its members’ lack of concern over genocide because of their inbred training in the theories of Malthus and Darwin. (“These gooks will never be able to feed themselves anyhow, so why does it matter if they die? And, we are the fittest anyhow.”) These are strong forces once inbred, and they show themselves in such campaigns as that which occurred in Indochina between 1945 and 1975 and again in the Middle East “Gulf War” of 1991.
Almost from the beginning, Diem was faced with an attempted coup d’etat. This threat was ended when the CIA bought off Gen. Nguyen Van Minh and other rivals and packed them off to Paris. But this did not get Diem a needed army and a palace guard for his own protection. There were in the vicinity of Saigon some independently powerful sects. One of them was Cao Dai. By early 1955, the CIA was able to buy off the leader of this sect and place his army under Diem. Then, in June 1955, the army of another sect, the Hoa Hao, was defeated with money—its leader was bought off and his forces joined the government army. A third sect, the Binh Xuyen, better known as the “Binh Xuyen Bandits,” had been running the vice racketeering and the casinos in Cho Lon, a suburb of Saigon.
The CIA was able to arrange for its leader, the “Big Bandit,” Le Van Vien, to give up his forces and travel to Paris. All of a sudden there were a lot of wealthy ex-generals from Vietnam on the French Riviera. In Asia, as in most of the rest of the world, nothing talks like the American dollar, and the SMM checkbook had begun to create a government army for the almost defenseless, and totally powerless, Ngo Dinh Diem.
I am aware of the fact that most of the history books about the earlier days of warfare in Vietnam present rather elaborate accounts of how the Diem administration acquired these “sect” armies. That had to be the “cover story.” I have talked at great length with Lansdale on this subject. I was in Vietnam myself during those days, and I know that the “sect” armies, which were actually nothing more than modest paramilitary forces, had been easily bought up by the American dollar as a price of doing business in Vietnam. It is interesting to read Lansdale’s account in his own book, In the Midst of Wars, and the account in his biography, Edward Lansdale, by Cecil B. Curry. Both of these books are burdened with a very heavy coating of “cover story” over these events and cannot be taken as realistic accounts.
Most Asian armies of that type are no more than groups of men with families that are one day ahead of starvation. They have joined the army for a bowl of soup and some rice, per day, for themselves and their destitute families. It was this kind of army that the Saigon Military Mission said it was rushing through a course in “Combat PsyWar,” among other things.
One of the first “classes” of these troopers was flown to the vicinity of Hanoi, put in native garb, and told to run around the city spreading anti-Vietminh rumors. They were ordered to pass out leaflets that had been written by members of the Saigon Military Mission and to perform various acts of sabotage, such as putting sugar in the gas tanks of Ho Chi Minh’s trucks and army vehicles. Later, the Saigon Military Mission discovered that these “loyal” troops usually just melted away and lined up for soup with some of Ho Chi Minh’s forces.
By midsummer more men had joined the SMM, and its mission was broadened. Its members were now teaching “paramilitary” tactics—today called “terrorism”—and doing all they could to promote the movement of hundreds of thousands of “Catholic” Vietnamese from the north with promises of safety, food, land, and freedom in the south and with threats that they would be massacred by the Communists of North Vietnam and China if they stayed in the north.
This movement of Catholics—or natives whom the SMM called “Catholics”—from the northern provinces of Vietnam to the south, under the provisions of the Geneva Agreement, became the most important activity of the Saigon Military Mission and one of the root causes of the Vietnam War. The terrible burden these 1,100,000 destitute strangers imposed upon the equally poor native residents of the south created a pressure on the country and the Diem administration that proved to be overwhelming.
What Americans fail to realize is that the Southeast Asian natives are not a mobile people. They do not leave their ancestral village homes. They are deeply involved in ancestor worship and village life; both are sacred to them. Nothing could have done them more harm than to frighten them so badly that they thought they had a reason to leave their homes and villages.
These penniless natives, some 660,000 or more, were herded into Haiphong by the Saigon Military Mission and put aboard U.S. Navy transport vessels. About 300,000 traveled on the CIA’s Civil Air Transport aircraft, and others walked out. They were transported, like cattle, to the southernmost part of Vietnam, where, despite promises of money and other basic support, they were turned loose upon the local population. These northerners are Tonkinese, more Chinese than the Cochinese of the south. They have never mixed under normal conditions.
There was no way these two groups of people could be assimilated by a practically nonexistent country. It is easy to understand that within a short time these strangers had become bandits, of necessity, in an attempt to obtain the basics of life. The local uprisings that sprung up wherever these poor people were dumped on the south were given the name “Communist insurgencies,” and much of the worst and most pernicious part of the twenty years of warfare that followed was the direct result of this terrible activity that had been incited and carried out by CIA’s terroristic Saigon Military Mission.
Moreover, these 1,100,000 Tonkinese Vietnamese were, of course, northerners—that is, the “enemy” in the Vietnamese scenario. However, since the Diems were more closely affiliated with natives of the north than the south, it was not long before a large number of these so-called “refugees” had found their way into key jobs in the Diem governmental infrastructure of South Vietnam.
When one thinks about this enormous man-made problem for a while, he or she begins to realize that much of the Vietnamese “problem” had been ignited by our own people shortly after the Geneva Agreements were concluded. Nothing that occurred during these thirty years of warfare, 1945—75, was more pernicious than this movement of these 1,100,000 “Catholics” from the north to the south at a time when the government of the south scarcely existed. (The figure of 1,100,000 used here is from a John Foster Dulles speech while he was secretary of state.)
Although the men of the Saigon Military Mission had many other duties in Vietnam, their biggest task was to keep Ngo Dinh Diem alive, and they solved this problem in a typical CIA manner for ten years.
If the truth were known, the chief of state of most Third World countries today—under the rules of the superpower world game—owes his job and his life, day by day, to an elite palace guard that he can control and, he hopes, trust.
In many countries around the world, the leaders of the elite guard have been trained by the CIA or the KGB. Originally, Diem had none of these essentials of power, so the Saigon Military Mission turned to the Philippines, where it had just succeeded in ousting President Quirino and putting Magsaysay in the Presidential Palace.
The Saigon Military Mission borrowed one of Ramon Magsaysay’s closest friends and aides from his own elite guard: Col. Napoleon Valeriano.
Valeriano had selected and trained Magsaysay’s elite guard. This amazing Filipino would later play an important part in the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961. He arrived in Saigon with three junior officers from the same Filipino elite guard to begin the process of selecting Vietnamese who for one reason or another could be expected to be loyal to Ngo Dinh Diem. These candidates were then flown to Manila for training and indoctrination.
One way to guarantee loyalty to the ruler is to employ only those men who have wives and children and then to provide a place for those wives and children to live—as hostages. This hostage environment helps to assure “undying loyalty.”
Slowly, Diem was able to act more and more as the head of state, just like his more experienced counterparts in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma, all of whom had been beneficiaries of similar CIA elite guard assistance.
During this period, relations between the nominal chief of state, Bao Dai, and the premier, Diem, worsened. In 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem, the CIA’s newcomer, called for a popular referendum in this newly delineated piece of real estate called South Vietnam to decide whether Bao Dai should continue as chief of state or whether the country should become a republic under his own leadership as president.
It was quite an experience to prepare for an election in a new country that had never had a real one before, especially when many of its millions of residents did not know the country existed or where its borders were located or who Ngo Dinh Diem was. With its recent experience of a similar nature in the Philippines, however, the CIA felt quite certain that this “free, democratic” election would favor its man. In any case, the leaders of the SMM were going to see that their men counted the ballots.
It was in response to challenges like this that the SMM’s special talents revealed themselves. Someone located and then ordered one million tiny “phonograph” toys. They were delivered with a brief political speech recorded by Ngo Dinh Diem. The villagers, who had never seen or heard of anything like this before, were astounded. Such modern “witchcraft” as this “voice in a box” helped guarantee the election of Diem.
Diem received 98 percent of the vote, and on October 26, 1955, he proclaimed the area south of the 17th parallel—actually the legal line of demarcation was the river known as Song Ben Hai, but it was usually referred to as the 17th parallel—the Republic of Vietnam. As a result of this election, Ngo Dinh Diem became its first president.
This brought matters full circle. At the National Security Council meeting of January 29, 1954, the Dulles brothers laid plans for the creation of a new nation that would be backed by the United States, to continue the then “nine-year” war in Indochina.
It had taken them almost two years to witness the defeat of the French, the dissolution of the Bao Dai government, the movement of Ngo Dinh Diem from exile to the position of premier in Saigon, and finally Diem’s installation as president and “Father of his Country” in South Vietnam. None of this could have happened without the skillful undercover work of the CIA and its experienced Saigon Military Mission.