Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam

by Fredrik Logevall

  On October 22, 1954, the State Department instructed the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) immediately to formulate and initiate with the Vietnamese government a “program for training that number of Vietnamese armed forces necessary to carry out internal security missions.” The following day in Saigon, Ambassador Heath delivered a letter (drafted several weeks before) from Eisenhower to Diem offering expanded American assistance to the Saigon government for the purpose of “developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means.” The United States had of course already been providing assistance, but much of it was through the French; this time, Eisenhower stressed, the aid would be given “directly to your government.” The letter did caution Diem that U.S. assistance would be conditioned on the Saigon government’s readiness “to give assurances as to the standards of performance it would be able to maintain,” and on its commitment to “undertaking needed reforms.”27 In its public announcement of the new policy, however, the administration played down any such concerns. The core concern of the president’s letter, officials said, was to emphasize America’s support and “to strengthen the hand of the Premier and give his regime ammunition to use against his political enemies.”28 Thus began, it could be said, the formal U.S. commitment to South Vietnam.

  Half a world away in Paris, John Foster Dulles pressed Pierre Mendès France to do more to support the Diem government. It was October 23, mere hours after Diem received Eisenhower’s letter. Time was running out in Vietnam, Dulles warned, and he reminded the Frenchman that Mansfield’s report carried great weight in Washington. Mendès France, “aghast” when informed by Dulles that if Diem fell, the United States might disengage from Vietnam entirely, could only grit his teeth and repeat La Chambre’s assurances from a few weeks before: The French government, though it doubted that Diem could succeed, would stand behind him.29

  IV

  ALL OF WHICH UNDERSCORES JUST HOW POOR WERE THE PROSPECTS for the Geneva Accords from the very start. Only one of the major players at the conference, it turned out, namely Ho Chi Minh’s DRV, had indicated an intention to adhere to the provisions for reunification spelled out in the settlement, and the most powerful player of them all, the United States, was adopting a policy that flew in the face of those provisions. No other major player was willing to push the matter. The new leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, did not want a fracas over elections in Vietnam to interfere with his policy of improved relations with the West. Chinese officials, preoccupied with the tense confrontation with the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Straits over the Quemoy and Matsu islands, also stayed largely silent, content to issue tepid protests. France, consumed after early November 1954 by the outbreak of war in Algeria, remained unwilling to seriously contest U.S. aims (as Mendès France again made clear when he visited Washington that month). Great Britain, cosponsor with the Soviet Union of the Geneva Conference, initially worked to ensure the implementation of the accords but backed off when Washington made its position clear. Anthony Eden griped that his government was being “treated like Australia” by the White House, but he was not willing to risk a serious falling-out with his powerful ally on account of Indochina.30

  Nevertheless, a fragile peace settled across Vietnam in the second half of 1954. Some 132,000 French Union troops (roughly half of them Vietnamese auxiliaries) withdrew to the south, while a slightly smaller number of Viet Minh soldiers, administrative cadres, and their families moved north. Both Vietnamese governments claimed to rule the entire country, but neither wanted to press the issue, not yet anyway. Both understood that they had urgent tasks to complete, not the least of which was to consolidate authority within their own zone.

  For Ho and the DRV, the economic problems at year’s end were overwhelming. Most factories in the north were shuttered, and many of the owners had left the country. In Hanoi, foreign journalists reported that scores of restaurants and shops had gone out of business, while in the port city of Haiphong only one of thirty French-owned factories remained open. Fuel for motor vehicles was in short supply, and the railroads were idle. Even more pressing, rice production continued to decline, and floods in December along the central coast raised the specter of major famine. The price of the commodity in the markets skyrocketed. And whereas Tonkin had traditionally been able to rely on the more fertile Cochin China for much of its food, now the Saigon government blocked economic exchange between the two zones. In 1955, only emergency rice imports from Burma, financed by the Soviet Union, prevented a recurrence of the disastrous famine of 1945. Nor did it help the economic recovery that many urban professionals and shopkeepers and Catholics—fearing what Communism would bring—fled to the south.

  At first, the government moved cautiously as it grappled with these problems. To reassure well-to-do farmers and the urban bourgeoisie, it initially vowed to respect private property and religious freedom. To Sainteny and members of the ICC, it continued to pledge support for the Geneva Accords and a desire to maintain harmonious relations with neighboring countries. But much as in China, where an initial policy of moderation in 1949–50 was followed by much harsher measures, officials in short order adopted more radical approaches.

  The centerpiece was an ambitious land reform program first implemented in liberated areas of the north in late 1953 and now expanded to cover the whole of North Vietnam. The aim was to alleviate food shortages (the 1945 famine was still fresh in the mind) and break the power of the large landowners—to bring about, as the regime put it, equality for the greatest number among the rural masses—and over the long term it achieved considerable results in this regard. But the cost was immense. Instead of offering incentives to the people to spur production, doctrinaire officials categorized people in five groups, from “landlord” to “farm worker,” then sent platoons of cadres to arraign the landlords and other “feudal elements” in what were called “agricultural reform tribunals.” In reality, however, the distinction between social categories was not always clear, and many families of modest means saw their land seized. Small landholders were classified as large ones. Panic set in. Fearful of arbitrary indictment, peasants trumped up charges against their neighbors, while others accused their rivals of imaginary crimes. Anyone suspected of having worked for the French was subject to execution as a “traitor.” Others were condemned merely for showing insufficient zeal and ardor for the Viet Minh.31

  “My father was an active militant with the Party during the war,” one Viet Minh cadre from the village of Son Duong, in Phu Tho province, recalled. “Our house was frequently used for meetings of Party leaders and my father was named treasurer because he was rich.… I was not at home when the land reform was begun, but I learned that they seized everything we had except for the water buffalo shed, which was given back to us because someone mentioned that my younger brother and I were in the armed forces.… To survive, the family sold buffalo dung as fertilizer, but the money was confiscated because ‘the fertilizer belonged to the people.’ ”32

  Executions became commonplace, though the scale of the killing is still unclear—estimates have run as high as 50,000 victims, but more credible assessments put the figure between 3,000 and 15,000.33 Thousands more were interned in forced labor camps. Most of the victims were innocent, at least of the stated charges. Ho Chi Minh, it seems, knew about the arbitrary persecution and violence but did little to prevent it. When Mrs. Nguyen Thi Nam, an important landlord and Viet Minh sympathizer, was condemned to death by a people’s tribunal and executed, Ho expressed frustration but did little more. “The French say that one should never hit a woman, even with a flower,” he reportedly declared, “and you, you allowed her to be shot!” Later, on February 8, 1955, Ho used the occasion of a conference on the land reform to condemn the use of torture and humiliation: “Some cadres are using the same methods to crush the masses as the imperialists, capitalists, and feudalists did. These methods are barbaric.… It is absolutely forb
idden to use physical punishment.”34

  Some did not get the message, or did and ignored it. The brutal actions continued. In August 1956, Ho Chi Minh issued a public acknowledgment that “errors have been committed,” and he promised that “those who have been wrongly classified as landlords and rich peasants will be correctly reclassified.” Other officials dutifully echoed his admission, disclosing that even loyal Viet Minh veterans had been wrongly tried and executed. Truong Chinh, general secretary of the party and a key proponent of the program, was relieved of his post, as were other senior officials, including the minister of agriculture. The tribunals were ended. These measures helped reduce the tensions but not fully—late in the year in coastal Nghe An province, where Ho was born and raised, farmers in one district openly rioted, requiring the dispatch of government troops to restore order. In Hanoi, meanwhile, intellectuals chafed under what they saw as authoritarian state cultural policies.35

  None of this unrest, however, really posed a fundamental test of the regime’s authority. Ho Chi Minh’s stature remained unchallenged; more than ever he was, for a great many of his compatriots, the embodiment of Vietnamese nationalism. Under him operated a bureaucracy that was capable, disciplined, and ruthless—techniques such as imprisonment, execution, press censorship, and indoctrination programs were standard—as well as a potent military seasoned by the long war against France. Furthermore the food situation slowly improved, and the land reform program, for all its horrors, distributed land to more than half of all families in the north. Meanwhile the mass exodus of middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs and Catholics, though a drain on talent and though embarrassing from a public relations angle, removed a major source of potential opposition to DRV authority.

  V

  IN THE SOUTH, THE SITUATION WAS EVEN MORE VOLATILE. DIEM’S government, with a cabinet made up of inexperienced appointees, faced an array of difficulties and had done little to solidify its position as 1954 drew to a close. The religious sects and the Binh Xuyen continued to apply pressure, and Franco-U.S. friction remained pronounced, notwithstanding Paris leaders’ assurances that they would follow America’s lead in Vietnam.36 Rumors flew of French-sponsored schemes to overthrow the government. But Diem, aware that the French lacked leverage and that he enjoyed staunch American backing, remained seemingly unruffled. And indeed, whenever a challenge to Diem’s rule by dissident Vietnamese arose during these weeks, American officials warned that his overthrow would result in a withdrawal of U.S. assistance, leaving the south ripe for a DRV takeover. The plotters duly backed off.

  Washington’s effort to bolster Diem’s authority included initiatives aimed equally at building popular support for him and undermining his adversaries, northern as well as southern. Conventional and unconventional means would be used. “The Central Intelligence Agency was given the mission of helping Diem develop a government that would be sufficiently strong and viable to compete with and, if necessary, stand up to the Communist regime of Ho Chi Minh in the North,” Chester Cooper, then a CIA official, remembered later.37

  Taking charge of this effort was Colonel Edward G. Lansdale, a soft-spoken but charismatic forty-eight-year-old air force colonel attached to the CIA. A former advertising man who had been raised in Los Angeles and had worked under “Wild Bill” Donovan in the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Lansdale had a reputation in Washington as a master of psychological warfare and counterinsurgency. He had played a significant role in suppressing the left-wing Huk insurgency in the Philippines in the early 1950s and in building support for Philippine president Ramón Magsaysay. (Lansdale, one account goes so far as to say, “virtually invented” Magsaysay.)38 Now he was asked to perform the same feat in South Vietnam. “Do what you did in the Philippines,” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles instructed him. CIA director Allen Dulles repeated his brother’s orders and added a personal message: “God bless you.”39

  Lansdale set up shop in Saigon in June 1954, before Ngo Dinh Diem’s arrival and even before the outcome in Geneva was known. In short order, he created what became in effect a parallel (and autonomous) unit to the regular CIA station, a covert intelligence operation called the Saigon Military Mission, made up of a dozen soldiers and analysts who specialized in black ops and who had two other things in common: a devotion to Lansdale and a willingness to live dangerously. To sow dissension in North Vietnam, the team undertook sabotage efforts across the seventeenth parallel—destroying printing presses, contaminating fuel supplies, counterfeiting Viet Minh documents to frighten peasants, even recruiting soothsayers to conjure up fake forecasts of catastrophe under Communism. The CIA team also formed secret squads of anti-Communist Vietnamese who infiltrated the north in order to stash weapons and ammunition for use in possible future uprisings, and more generally to gather information and foment unrest. The squads accomplished little. Most of their members were rounded up and tried; some switched sides and claimed allegiance to Ho Chi Minh’s government.

  All the while, Lansdale worked to ingratiate himself with Ngo Dinh Diem. He succeeded so well that Diem, normally distrustful of anyone outside his immediate family, quickly invited him to move in to the presidential palace. Lansdale declined the offer, on the grounds that he remained officially an air force colonel, but he was a fixture in Diem’s office in the difficult early months, often being summoned for late-night meetings in which Diem showed his predilection for delivering lengthy monologues. Whereas other visitors invariably found this prolixity excruciating, Lansdale didn’t mind it—true, the Saigon leader might talk until dawn, he conceded, but only because his interests were so broad, ranging beyond politics to education, economics, and agriculture. However late the hour, Lansdale always arrived at the palace gate in full uniform.40

  Very often the conversation turned to domestic adversaries and how to deal with them. The quiet colonel soon proved his worth in this regard. When word came in October that Nguyen Van Hinh was stepping up plans for a coup, Lansdale hustled the general’s top lieutenants off to Manila and kept them entertained there until the danger passed. In November, at Lansdale’s urging, Washington pressured Bao Dai into ordering General Hinh’s departure—almost two months after Diem had ousted him.

  EDWARD LANSDALE AND NGO DINH DIEM IN AN UNDATED PHOTO, TAKEN AT THE PRESIDENTIAL PALACE IN SAIGON. (photo credit 25.3)

  “I had only to lift my telephone, and the coup d’état would have been over,” Hinh said soon after. “Nothing could have opposed the army. But the Americans let me know that if that happened, dollar help would have been cut off. That would not matter to the military; if necessary, we soldiers could go barefoot and eat rice. But the country cannot survive without American help. We would only have played into the Viets’ hands with a revolt.”41

  Lansdale also helped facilitate the mass movement of refugees from north to south—though almost certainly his role has been exaggerated in some accounts. Beginning in a serious way in the summer of 1954, waves of refugees, most of them Catholic, went to the south under the provisions of the Geneva Accords permitting civilian regroupment. (Article 14d: “Any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party who wish to go and live in the zone assigned to the other party shall be permitted and helped to do so.”) As hundreds of thousands of refugees descended upon Haiphong in August and awaited evacuation, the French Air Force and Navy, realizing they were unprepared for the onslaught, asked Washington for assistance. The Pentagon ordered the U.S. Navy to mobilize a task force to assist in the evacuation, and in short order, ships were steaming from Subic Bay in the Philippines, bound for Haiphong.

  All told, French and U.S. ships would make some five hundred trips in three hundred days, ferrying almost nine hundred thousand people southward, in perhaps the largest civilian evacuation—and largest sea migration—in history to that point. Entire northern Catholic communities abandoned most of their worldly possessions and set off en masse, their priests in the lead, in what the U.S. Navy dubbed Operation Passage to Free
dom. The result was a major reordering of the religious balance of Vietnam. Before the exodus, most Vietnamese Catholics lived north of the seventeenth parallel; afterward the majority lived south of it. By 1956, the diocese of Saigon had more Catholics than Paris or Rome. By then, more than a million of Vietnam’s Catholics lived in the south, 55 percent of them refugees from the north.42

  The United States and the State of Vietnam reaped significant propaganda benefits from the mass exodus to the south in 1954–55. It seemed a perfect example of refugees “voting with their feet,” a damning indictment of the Viet Minh regime, and it was especially notable for the fact that comparatively few people went in the other direction, from south to north. The evacuation received wide play in the American press, with readers learning that the travelers, once they completed the journey, were given “welcome kits” of soap, towel, and toothpaste, and tins of milk labeled “From the people of America to the people of Viet Nam—a gift.” Left out of the accounts was that the exodus was not altogether spontaneous. Though many Catholics needed no incentive to leave the north, Lansdale and his CIA team initiated a campaign to convince the skeptics. In Catholic areas in the north, they broadcast the messages that “Christ has gone to the south” and “The Virgin Mary has departed the north” in order to be with Diem, a devout Catholic. They promised “five acres and a water buffalo” to every relocated refugee. In another gambit, Lansdale arranged for leaflets to be dropped over the same areas showing a map of North Vietnam with a series of concentric circles emanating from Hanoi. The none-too-subtle suggestion: that Hanoi was a likely target for a U.S. atomic bomb.43

  Even some Americans on the scene questioned the claims. “At one point I recall arguing with Lansdale over a propaganda story about village children whose eardrums had been ruptured by the insertion of chopsticks during a Viet Minh torture session,” Howard Simpson of the U.S. Information Service, who was in Saigon as a kind of unofficial press adviser to Diem in the period, later wrote. “There was something about the account that didn’t ring true. I had seen and heard enough of torture by both sides during my time in the field. Chopsticks had never featured as a preferred instrument.… Lansdale only flashed his all-knowing smile and changed the subject. The chopstick story soon spread through Haiphong and was picked up by the Saigon press and some Western correspondents. The veteran psywarrior obviously knew his business.”44