This work is concerned with the history of a specific era in American-Vietnamese relations wherein President Ngo Dinh Diem was betrayed and murdered, owing to the collusion of his erstwhile allies with local Vietnamese plotters. Thus, this first chapter provides the backdrop to this American betrayal of an ally in a time of war.
After the Americans helped Diem become president of South Vietnam in 1955, he immediately set out to improve his country. Diem’s Communist adversaries were realists, and they understood that with Diem’s competent administration and his ambitious development projects in the rural areas they had a problem on their hands. South Vietnam was not disintegrating into the kind of chaos that would have made a reintegration with the Communist North a foregone conclusion.
The Communists understood the many grievances that they could exploit to organise an indigenous revolutionary movement in the South, which came to be called the National Liberation Front (NLF). No emerging nation, at least in Southeast Asia, was immune from such problems.1 But political action with a duly subordinated military campaign was needed to break the bonds being formed between the Diem government and the people. This took the form of terrorism, which was iniquitous in design and execution and ironically labelled the Destruction of the Oppression. By March 1958, Destruction of the Oppression had assassinated more than four hundred village officials. In 1959 they began murdering schoolteachers, mostly in the key Mekong Delta provinces of Long An, Kien Hoa, and Dinh Tuong. This campaign contributed to the subsequent lack of schooling for nearly thirty thousand children—children who, to the advantage of the Communists, no longer had any positive relationship with the government of South Vietnam.2
Destruction of the Oppression was not only tactically selective in terms of those targeted for torture and murder but also strategically overarching, designed to frighten the general populace away from helping and supporting the government. Indeed, as the Communists testified themselves: “Our purpose was not only to eliminate those who could be harmful to the movement but also with a view toward making the people afraid and to prevent them from co-operating with the government.”3 Thus, the Communists were intent on undermining the legitimacy of the government to the point where it would no longer be viable.4 Specifically, they were targeting Diem’s leadership, which they knew had a unique standing in the eyes of the Vietnamese.
French scholar Paul Mus was well acquainted with both Ho Chi Minh, the Communist leader of North Vietnam, and Ngo Dinh Diem, and he understood that only “a man who is known to be virtuous and who leads an austere life” constituted a legitimate leader for the Vietnamese. As a result, he said to historian Ellen Hammer, “Only one man could ever hope to challenge Ho Chi Minh for leadership—Ngo Dinh Diem. Because he alone has the same reputation for virtue and austerity as Ho.”5 Mus had grown up in Vietnam, and his expert knowledge of the country was highly regarded by the French government, which made him its official emissary to Ho Chi Minh during the First Indochina War. Mus related his observations to the Americans in 1948 as both a commendation of Diem and a warning that he could not be used as “their man”.6 In an interview with the author, Vietnamese General Nguyen Khanh, who participated in the overthrow of Diem, concurred with Mus’ assessment of him. Diem’s legitimacy with the people was based on his virtue, he said. “The number one thing was the example of the way of his life; how he lived his life. He sacrificed himself!”7
The ongoing Destruction of the Oppression spanned the gamut from few or no killings to outright slaughter that even the Americans at their undisciplined worst8 would not come close to matching.9 In their pitiless analysis, the Communists understood that terror worked best when it paralysed the greatest amount of people; thus, it was most effective when it seemed to be only partially selective, like lightning, that way, no one could predict who would get hit next.10
Analyst William R. Andrews, in his studies, tours, and interviews within South Vietnam, determined that the killings of village officials, schoolteachers, public health workers, and other civil servants reached its peak in 1963, with a definite decline in 1964.11Andrews has argued that the sharp drop in killings of civil servants in 1964 was owing to a combination of factors. In the first place, by 1964 the Destruction of the Oppression had been effective in eliminating government workers from areas that had been penetrated by the party earlier on; second, the South Vietnamese officials in the rural areas were no longer exposing themselves; they were avoiding death by withdrawing their involvement with the people living in rural villages.12
There is, however, a third explanation, which has primary strategic implications and is linked directly to the central thesis of this book, which is the singular importance of Ngo Dinh Diem. By 1964 it was no longer necessary to kill civil servants and to discredit the government of South Vietnam (GVN) to the same extent because Diem, the government’s most powerful and substantial pillar of political legitimacy, had been removed. Even with military power attempting to fill the political vacuum created by the demise of Diem, it was just a matter of time before the whole structure collapsed. Communist though they were, the insurrectionists were also Vietnamese, and they knew that soldiers could never take the place of a leader like Diem in the hearts and the minds of their people. Thus, the strategic political victory granted to the Communists by the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem cannot be overstated.
All of this has a great deal of bearing upon just who was responsible for the insurrection in the South: Was it the allegedly corrupt and incompetent administration of President Diem, as some of his detractors have argued, or the carefully planned and executed Communist insurgency? Evidence suggests that a superb Communist organisational structure was already in place even before Diem had taken up the reins of power.13 Certainly the Communists in the North made no attempt to hide their control of the insurrection in the South. This was made manifest when in 1963 they offered Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s younger brother and chief political advisor, a cease-fire in exchange for the beginning of an American withdrawal from Vietnam. Indeed, Seymour M. Hersh argued that the Kennedy administration engineered and supported the coup that removed Diem from power because Kennedy and his officials worried that the Ngo Dinhs were, in fact, going to come to such terms with the North.14
Dennis Duncanson, in his studies of 1950s Vietnam, observed that the Communists had been conducting their campaign of terror from the earliest days of Diem’s administration. They had not been idle during or after President Diem’s initial triumphs over the militarised sects Binh Xuyen, Cao Dai, and Hoa Hao.15 According to Duncanson, they had a “sleeper”, or a hidden party base, in most villages,16 and threats, coercion, and selective assassinations kept peasants in a perpetual state of terror. When Diem refused to hold nationwide elections with the Communist-controlled North in 1956, as called for by the Geneva Accords that ended the First Indochina War between the French and the Viet Minh, the Communists found a new justification, and a new propaganda tool, for their terror campaign and escalated their violent activities.17 A British counterinsurgency expert and an advisor to Diem’s government, Sir Robert Thompson, noted that the published figures for murders and abductions by insurgents exceeded twelve thousand civilians and government workers between 1960 and 1961.18
The Communists were seeking to estrange the people from their government, not only by killing its workers but also by destroying the relative peace and stability it had achieved in rural South Vietnam between 1955 and 1958. Another British counterinsurgency expert, P.J. Honey, who was attached to Thompson’s advisory mission to President Diem, duly noted the calm during this era:
The country has enjoyed three years of relative peace and calm in which it has been able to carry on the very necessary work of national reconstruction. The most destructive feature in the national life of Vietnam throughout recent years has been the lack of security in the countryside, which obliged farmers and peasants to abandon the rice fields and to flee to the large cities for safety. Today it is possible to travel all over South Vietnam without any risk. The army and security forces have mopped up most of the armed bands of political opponents of the Government, of Communists and of common bandits.19
Contrary to their arguments, the Communists were not terrorizing the countryside in retribution for Diem’s refusal to participate in reunification elections. The fact is, the Communists in the North were in no position to hold such elections, and they were lying about their adherence to the Geneva Accords.20 In short, through violence they created a situation in which nationwide elections were unthinkable to Diem and his supporters, including the Americans, and then used their non-participation as a stick to beat them with. All of their actions were calculated to erode the people’s trust in Diem.21 Their lack of trust would, in turn, bring about strategic paralysis in the governing of South Vietnam, because the people would be deterred from supporting Saigon. In essence, the Communists were involved in an all-out effort to destroy the legitimacy of Ngo Dinh Diem and his government.22
While this attack on the legitimacy of the Diem government was already under way at the tactical, village level in South Vietnam,23 in May 1959, at the fifteenth plenum of the Communist Central Committee, the leaders of North Vietnam made the formal decision to direct strategically the entire insurgency in the South. The North Vietnamese Communist leadership considered a number of questions; chief amongst these was whether to send their own North Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops or simply to increase support for the Viet Minh organisation already in the South. In their estimation, it was better to expand support for the Viet Minh (later called Viet Cong) while leaving the option open for using regular troops of the NVA, also known as the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), should the Southern resistance prove too strong. One of the benefits of this course of action was that it would not attract worldwide condemnation for a Korean-style invasion of the South. Should it become necessary, such an invasion could be launched later under the guise of supporting “the freedom-loving peoples of the South in their fight against oppression”. Expanding their Southern insurgency, then, became the order of the day, which placed the Viet Minh under the same general command as the NVA.24
William Colby, who was CIA station chief in Saigon between 1959 and 1962, observed that given Diem’s progress in stabilising and rebuilding South Vietnam, the Communists had little choice but to increase their violent attacks; otherwise, they would lose not only the South but potentially the North as well.25 Colby described the GVN’s programs to rebuild the basic infrastructure of the rural areas of the South, between 1956 and 1959, as “the total social and economic regeneration of South Vietnam”. Villages that had been abandoned during the Viet Minh war were repopulated. Land reform had made the peasant farmers more productive; for example, rice production was increasing. New schools were being built in rapid order. Colby noted that in one particular province he visited, there had been only two or three schools at the end of the Viet Minh war, all in the province capital. By the spring of 1959, there were approximately forty new schools spread throughout the province.26 These were practical and therefore powerful indicators to the ordinary Vietnamese that Diem took their welfare into account as he developed the country. In short, the Communists recognised that their campaign to take the South was finished unless they escalated the violence and thereby separated the people from the GVN.27 The time, then, for substantial Northern assistance for the stay-behind cadres in the South was at hand, and it became clear to most observers that by 1960 the Viet Minh were embarking upon another major war, the political target being Ngo Dinh Diem, who turned out to be more assailable through the Americans than through the Vietnamese.28
From the time Diem became president in 1955, he was opposed by some of the more liberally minded, educated, and articulate South Vietnamese, particularly those with political aspirations of their own. In the face of violent threats from first the militarised sects and then the Communist insurgents, Diem took a tough approach to any political opposition, including outlawing certain groups, shutting down their newspapers, and arresting some of their leaders. These actions Diem thought necessary to prevent the fledgling republic from collapsing. Some South Vietnamese, however, saw Diem and his family as antiquated and authoritarian mandarins, and they feared, as opposition leader Phan Quang Dan told Life reporter John Osborne, that Diem was building a “Ngo dynasty”.29
Some members of Diem’s opposition put forward a manifesto of grievances, which they first enunciated at the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon and thus became known as the Caravellists.30 In their “Manifesto of the Eighteen”,31 which they gave to the international press, they claimed that Diem and his brother Nhu were playing into the hands of the Communists with their “state-of-emergency” methods of government.32 Furthermore, they argued that Diem was being insulated from the truth by members of the government’s executive branch and that he needed to act upon Caravellist advice if the country was to be spared from complete destruction at the hands of a rebellious populace.33 But more circumspect American military intelligence reports indicated that many of this Caravellist Eighteen were suspect in terms of their impartiality. All of them were involved in Saigon politics with their sights set upon leadership roles.34
President Diem and his advisor brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were not moved by the arguments of the Caravellists. According to Colby, “Diem and Nhu contemptuously rejected the petition, remarking on the plush surroundings of the Caravelle Hotel in which this group of Saigon politicians had gathered, and on their lack of contact with the rural areas where the real battle against both the Communists and underdevelopment were underway.”35 The Caravellists’ cry for “freedom” and “democracy” made great play in the liberal U.S. press, however, which in turn put U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Elbridge Durbrow in conflict with Diem. Essentially, under pressure from Washington, Durbrow argued that democratic reforms had to flow rapidly or the supposed proverbial dam of South Vietnamese political outrage would burst. Diem countered that in any fledgling government representing an emerging nation, authority had to be maintained while democratic institutions were being constructed; this was especially the case in South Vietnam, where not just Communist insurgents were hard at work undermining lawful authority but several sects with private armies had been attempting to do the same thing. Diem further argued that the Caravellists had no following beyond the cafés of Saigon, where the U.S. news media swarmed to garner the latest anti-Diem gossip.36
Diem responded to the criticism by intensifying the very measures that had initially caused it: press censorship, detention without trial, implementation of the Agroville Program,37 and Can Lao Party38 control of the army.39 Meanwhile, although the Caravellists were unable to come up with any practical method for dealing with the Communists, American advisors continued to urge Diem to implement democratic reforms in order to gain the confidence and support of the people.40 But the net “effect of the [Caravellists’] petition was to start a political war within Saigon to go along with and complicate the guerrilla war in the countryside”.41
American criticism at this time also took aim at Diem’s land reform. Historian George C. Herring offered a leftist critique of Diem’s program, saying not enough peasants were benefiting from the redistribution of land. He accused Diem of “a singular lack of concern and near-callous irresponsibility”.42 Herring’s analysis, however, did not take into account the social conditions Diem was trying to overcome and the undermining effects of Communist propaganda.
William Colby, on the other hand, appreciated the practicality of Diem’s approach in the face of tremendous challenges. When U.S. advisors complained that the parcels of land being taken from the French and sold to the Vietnamese were too large and left powerful landlords in place, Colby explained, Diem said he could not make them smaller without harming the middle class. Diem thus urged his allies to be patient, because he was “going to use the apparatus of social order that exists in order to conduct this longer-term transition”. Meanwhile, noted Colby, the Communists were subverting the program by trying to convince the peasants that the land reforms were set up to make them pay more taxes.43
Along with the redistribution of existing farmland, the Diem government made more land available for cultivation, introduced new crops, and built model rural communities in which Vietnamese farmers could flourish free of Communist insurgent activities. “One of the actualities was the development of the trans-Bassac region, the land between the Bassac branch of the Mekong River and the Gulf of Thailand. The first phase called for settling over a hundred thousand people in new model farm communities in the Cai Sab area and draining the low-tying land by constructing 125 miles of navigable canals.”44 As mentioned earlier, Diem hired American land reform expert Wolf Ladejinsky to help him to plan these communities.
The two men became close friends in 1956, and Ladejinsky was given a house next to the presidential palace and joined Diem at breakfast nearly every morning. Thus Diem’s daily routine began with these breakfast sessions, discussing the implementation of the land reform measures drafted by Ladejinsky and issued as decrees by Diem, as well as the myriad problems of the whole range of agricultural projects afoot. Both men shared the dream of making an Eden of Vietnam, with bounty for all its inhabitants and with ample foods for other nations in the Pacific basin.45
Diem’s critics found plenty wrong with these ambitious projects. They accused Diem of being too authoritarian, of exercising too much control in order to aggrandise himself.
In an attempt to prove that Diem was a power-hungry dictator, or at least a bungler, Diem’s critics derided his 1956 suspension of local democratic elections. Calling the action Diem’s “most fateful decision”, Bernard Fall wrote, “In defiance of one of the most hallowed Vietnamese traditions, according to which the power of the central authorities stops at the bamboo hedge of the village, the Saigon administration abolished by a stroke of the pen elected village chiefs and village councils and replaced them by appointive members.”46 Historian Larry Cable agreed that Diem made “a massive and egregious error in 1956, when he prohibited the traditional and deeply cherished village elections and instead appointed as village chiefs fellow Catholic refugees from the North. This was a blunder which even the French and the Japanese had not committed during their terms as occupiers of Vietnam. It was a cause of massive discontent among the rural population of South Vietnam.”47 The criticism is misleading, because it ignores that many villages had already been infiltrated by violent Communist subversives, necessitating GVN intervention. As we have seen, in such places the choices were stark for villagers: submit to the will of the Communists or die a horrible death along with all of your family members.
What was lacking in so much Western criticism of Diem was any fair comparison between his leadership and that of his rival in the North, Ho Chi Minh. Fall claimed that the Communists in the North had not been so stupid as to interfere with village leadership, but this assertion is disproved by the unfortunate historical facts. Under Communist rule, North Vietnamese peasants accomplished little by political protest other than their own deaths. In 1956 there was a massive rebellion against Ho Chi Minh’s land reform (which was, in effect, Stalinist collectivisation). Ho sent in the army, with the result that approximately ten thousand Vietnamese peasants lost their lives.48 Some estimate that at least 50,000 were murdered.49 Lansdale stated that the Communist officials, who were adept at running guerrilla warfare, proved to be terrible at running the Hanoi government. He claimed that the Northern Communists were so unpopular at this time that they would have been soundly defeated by Diem had the 1956 plebiscite reunification elections been held.50
Although Fall admitted that there had been a substantial stay-behind Communist organisation in the South, he failed to ascribe to it any thoroughgoing revolutionary capability.51 He did not take seriously the threat the Communists posed to Diem’s GVN, never mind how the president was supposed to deal with it. Nor did he credit Diem for the fact that his interference at the village level was temporary. Once his Strategic Hamlet Program (SHP) was in place, village elections were reinstated by the GVN, because the protected peasant communities were no longer subject to Communist intimidation.52
The Caravellists’ criticism of Diem’s land reform programs marked the beginning of a schism that began to develop in American policy toward the government in South Vietnam and the burgeoning guerrilla threat. The CIA was caught in the middle of what would turn out to be a long and bitter fight between the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of State (DOS). According to eyewitness Colby, DOD took a predictable stand by viewing the rising Viet Cong insurgency as the outbreak of war. As a result, officers in the U.S. military, such as General Sam Williams, argued that South Vietnamese troops needed to be shaped up and reorganised in order to meet the possibility of an invasion from North Vietnam. Consequently, the American military advisory in Vietnam reorganised the command structure of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in 1959 and called for an increase in men from 150,000 to 170,000 soldiers.53 It should be noted that regardless of the varying views on the design of the Vietnamese force necessary to defeat the Communists—more soldiers versus more policemen—Diem and his officials had quite good relations with the American military for the most part.
The conflict that arose between Saigon and Washington, Colby recalled, was between Diem and DOS. The disagreement was over the direction he and the U.S. military were taking. For DOS, the solution was for Diem to make his regime more democratic and less authoritarian. Thus, DOS viewed U.S. military aid as leverage to pressure Diem to reform his government. Quite naturally, the American military advisors were infuriated with DOS, who presumed to know the best way to counter the advances of North Vietnam.54
While observing the fight between DOD and DOS, Colby formed his own conclusions on counterinsurgency, which diverged from those of both departments and were heavily influenced by British successes and French failures. The North Vietnamese strategy in 1960, Colby saw, did not include conventional warfare. Rather, it was designed to create a “people’s war”. He recognised the telltale indicators of the first stage: the mobilisation and organisation of insurgent Communist forces.55 Since the immediate challenge was political subversion, it could not be easily addressed by the standard military doctrines being advocated by American military advisors. Colby was quick to add, however, that the calls for a more democratic government in Saigon were also, for the most part, irrelevant to the task at hand. As he quipped in an interview with the author, “It’s difficult to talk about draining the swamp when you are up to your—in alligators.”
The real battle, Colby noted, was what Sir Robert Thompson had famously described as the struggle for “the hearts and the minds of the people”. According to Thompson, “An insurgent movement is a war for the people.”56 And Colby could see that the side that won over the Vietnamese villagers would win.
The real contest, it seemed to me, was in the villages, where the issues were more fundamental. Did association with the Saigon government offer a better future, both economic and political, for the villager? Or did the national and revolutionary appeal of the Communist organiser, reinforced by the authority of guerrilla squads, convince the villager or leave him no alternative but to join the revolt? My travels in the countryside had shown how wide was the gap between the French-influenced urban class and the traditional Vietnamese villager. But it had also shown the latter’s enthusiastic acceptance of economic and social development and his willingness to work hard toward it. In the long term, villagers would certainly insist on more of a voice in their national affairs, even along the lines advocated by the oppositionists in Saigon, but in the near term, they were far more interested in the practical improvements that could be made in their lives and in the life-and-death issue of protection from the armed bands circulating in their regions. Thus, the real way to contest the Communists, it seemed to me, would be to mobilize, organize and involve the villagers in the economic and social improvements that the government was providing and to strengthen them so that they could help defend themselves against Communist pressures.57
Colby agreed with Thompson that a government could win over its people without being a Western-style democracy. An authoritarian government that applied the rule of law equally to all while engaging in constructive and progressive national policies, as Diem’s was doing, could garner popular support. Diem’s government needed only to prove its program equalled results while the Communist insurgency guaranteed the opposite.58
Unfortunately, the very fact that a Communist insurgency had begun to spread through rural South Vietnam in the late 1950s caused many Americans to take a critical view of Diem. By 1960 American experience with him and the GVN had created much controversy in Washington. To many American liberals, Diem was an enigma—and one they suspected was unsympathetic to their worldview. Between the lines of what they said and wrote about Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, one can detect a subtle but definite distaste. Over time this distaste blossomed into hatred.