A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Neil Sheehan

  Communists and other radicals claimed that this American imperial system was a more insidious form of colonialism than the old European variety. They termed it “neocolonialism.” Most Americans of the 1950s and early ’60s were untroubled by the accusation. They viewed the Communists as the true practitioners of neocolonialism. Communist leaders, especially Asian Communists, were, by American definition, traitors to their homelands. They were converts to the alien European philosophy of Marxism-Leninism and agents of foreign—i.e., Soviet—power. Lansdale likened Ho to Benedict Arnold, the great traitor of the American Revolution. “The tragedy of Vietnam’s revolutionary war for independence was that her ‘Benedict Arnold’ was successful,” he wrote. “Ho Chi Minh, helped by … a small cadre of disciplined Party members trained by the Chinese and the Russians, secretly changed the goals of the struggle. Instead of a war for independence against the French colonial power, it became a war to defeat the French and put Vietnam within the neocolonial Communist empire.”

  Viewed from the American imperial perspective, the Philippines of 1954 was the best of surrogates. The islands had been an American colony until 1946, when the Philippines had celebrated its independence day. In exchange for the grant of independence, the United States had received a ninety-nine-year lease on twenty-three military bases, including the important naval station at Subic Bay and Clark Air Base. The Philippines military and intelligence services continued to function as auxiliaries to the American ones; the Filipino government was more anti-Communist in its foreign policy than the Dulles brothers; and the islands provided a source of trained manpower for the United States to use in fighting Communist movements elsewhere in Asia.

  The achievement in the Philippines had been in jeopardy a few years before. Nourished by peasant discontent with landlordism and by resentment in the countryside and the cities against a corrupt and reactionary central government, the Communist-led Hukbalahap rebellion had grown to formidable proportions by the end of 1949. The Huks were able to field about 15,000 guerrillas and to claim another million sympathizers. The most important section of their politburo operated clandestinely right in Manila; mayors and police chiefs all over the main island of Luzon were in collusion with the Huks out of fear or genuine sympathy; the Philippines Army and Constabulary were ineffective; and elections were a jest of fraud and intimidation which lent logic to the Huk slogan that the way to change the government was with bullets, not ballots. The Huks predicted that they would win control of the Philippines within two years.

  It was a time of crisis when men’s reputations were made or broken. Lansdale made his. He was the catalyst and the behind-the-scenes manager of the rescue operation. He recognized in Ramón Magsaysay precisely the kind of honest and charismatic leader needed to rally those Filipinos who did not want a Communist government, but who were now leaderless and adrift. The son of a farmer and blacksmith who was also a teacher, Magsaysay had started World War II running a bunch of buses as makeshift transport for the American and Filipino defenders of Bataan and had finished it commanding thousands of guerrillas against the Japanese. In 1950, when the job was hardly a sought-after one with the Huk rebellion at its height, he had resigned his seat in the Philippines House of Representatives to accept appointment as secretary of defense. He was an extrovert with abundant if frequently ill-directed energy, an inquisitive mind that also tended to run off in tangents, and a social conscience. He needed a brain trust to organize him.

  Lansdale became the brain trust. He had developed some practical ideas on how to suppress the rebellion from a previous tour in the islands as an Air Force intelligence officer assigned to study the Huks. He had returned to the Philippines on detail to the CIA. An affable man who made friends easily, Lansdale was soon sufficiently close to the new secretary of defense to persuade Magsaysay to share his house in the American military compound so that they could spend evenings sorting out Magsaysay’s problems. They made a superb team. The Huks suffered the consequences in a brilliantly led counterrevolution. With Lansdale to coach him, Magsaysay created an excellent intelligence service and reformed the army and the paramilitary constabulary into disciplined organizations with esprit and a sense of mission. He fired lazy and corrupt officers and promoted those who could lead and fight and who understood the importance of convincing the population that the military was their protector and not their despoiler. The troops started to treat the populace with civility and kindness rather than abuse. Civilians wounded in a crossfire received the same treatment as soldiers and constabulary men in military hospitals. Magsaysay saw to it that tenant farmers began obtaining justice in the courts. He assigned army lawyers to defend them against their landlords. Anyone in the Philippines could send a telegram to the secretary of defense for a few centavos and the complaints were acted upon. He convinced a majority of Filipinos that he and their government cared about them. He enforced the election laws and returned to Filipinos the right to change their government. He also gave the Huks a choice. They could surrender and obtain amnesty, or they could face increasingly certain imprisonment or death. By 1953 the rebellion was broken, the guerrillas reduced to small bands being swept up in police actions. Magsaysay was elected president of the Philippines the same year.

  Lansdale returned to CIA headquarters in Washington as a big man. The Agency had not yet built its modernistic rival to the Pentagon among the fields and woods of Langley, Virginia, and still had its headquarters in the city across the street from the State Department in a cluster of gingerbread brick Victorian buildings with a sign at the gate reading: “Department of the Navy, Medical Research.” Lansdale became the Agency’s expert on guerrilla warfare and countersubversion. He also acquired something more important in government than recognized expertise: a mystique, a reputation for being able to perform miracles.

  He was sent to Vietnam amid the despair after the fall of Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954. At a meeting in Washington four months earlier, when it had initially been decided that he would go to Saigon, he had asked John Foster Dulles what he was to do there. “Do what you did in the Philippines,” the secretary of state told him. Lansdale was given the special privilege government grants to a miracle worker. He was to cooperate with but to be independent of the U.S. ambassador and the general in charge of the military assistance group. He was to have his own team. He was to report directly to Washington through CIA channels.

  The night of his arrival on June 1, 1954, the Viet Minh celebrated their victory over the French by blowing up the ammunition dump at Tan Son Nhut, “rocking Saigon throughout the night,” Lansdale noted afterward in his secret account of the first year of his mission. It was not an auspicious commencement for a man who employed astrology, but Lansdale was not discouraged by the mood of “deepening gloom” he found in Saigon. By the time the French agreed to surrender the North to the Viet Minh with the conclusion of the Geneva Conference on July 21, 1954, he had decided on concrete steps to attain the goal of repeating his accomplishment in the Philippines. He was going to plant “stay-behind” resistance groups in the North to impede the ability of the Communists to govern and reconstruct their half of the country and thus delay the turning of their attention to the South. Simultaneously, he would do all he could to strengthen the position of Diem for the “nation-building” task in South Vietnam.

  The CIA maneuvered Bao Dai into offering the prime ministership to Diem that June of 1954. Although the former Vietnamese emperor had retreated to the safety of the Riviera in April, he was still head of state. Diem’s appointment was announced the day he landed in Saigon, July 7, 1954, five weeks after Lansdale and two weeks before the settlement at Geneva. The Eisenhower administration was in a hurry to find a Vietnamese leader whom it could trust now that American power would have to move directly into Vietnam and take over from the demoralized French. There were not many candidates from among whom to choose, and Diem seemed the best. His ardent Catholicism gave him impeccably anti-Communist credentials with Americans. Unlike
most non-Communist Vietnamese politicians with whom the Americans were acquainted, he was also thought to be a nationalist who had not been tainted by collaboration with the French, since he had not served in any of Bao Dai’s previous cabinets. He had impressed those American public figures whom he had met—Senator Mike Mansfield, Francis Cardinal Spellman, John Kennedy (then a first-term senator from Massachusetts), and Kennedy’s influential father, Joseph. Justice William O. Douglas had been sufficiently taken with him to write in 1953 that Diem “is a hero … revered by the Vietnamese because he is honest and independent and stood firm against the French influence.” Assessments of Diem like this one by Douglas were accepted at face value. Americans lacked the knowledge of the country necessary to gain a sophisticated perspective on Diem’s background. Even if they had been inclined to inquire much about him (which they were not), there was little time for inquiry in these fear-filled months when it seemed that the Communists would pause only long enough to consolidate their hold on the North before seizing all of the South as well.

  “Ev” Bumgardner recalled that the trip to Tuy Hoa was just one of many endeavors that Lansdale and those Americans helping him conceived to turn Diem into another American-style leader like Magsaysay and South Vietnam into a Philippines of the mid-1950s. Bumgardner had also arrived in the months right after Dien Bien Phu. While he was not a member of Lansdale’s team, he saw a great deal of him, because the USIS staff in Vietnam was under instructions to assist Lansdale and did so enthusiastically. One could hardly miss Lansdale. He was constantly in motion—the catalyst and organizer, as he had been in the Philippines. He sometimes put on his Air Force uniform, but never one of those formal white suits with a black tie that were de rigueur attire for French officialdom and that Diem and the diplomats at the U.S. Embassy wore. Instead, he usually dressed in a short-sleeved sport shirt and slacks. Bumgardner noticed that the Vietnamese respected Lansdale because he cared about them, he was one of the few Americans who could speak the language of guerrilla and counterguerrilla warfare, and he was a man of action who got things done. If you wanted to know what was happening or you needed something out of the ordinary, you went to Lansdale or to one of his senior team members, like Lucien Conein, the French-born roughneck, then a CIA agent posing as an Army major. “Lou” Conein had been brought back to Indochina from Germany, where he had been running undercover agents in and out of the East European countries, to organize the stay-behind resistance network in the North. Lansdale had wanted him because Conein was the only former OSS officer still on active service who had fought against the Japanese in Indochina with a commando of French and Vietnamese colonial troops. He had formed connections among the Vietnamese who had since risen to become officers under the French. (The other OSS men in Indochina during World War II had ended up working primarily with Ho and his Viet Minh guerrillas and would have been useless to Lansdale.)

  Haiphong, the main port in the North, was the first place Bumgardner encountered Lansdale. Operation Exodus, the movement to the South of 900,000 refugees, was beginning there in the summer of 1954. The migration of almost a million people from the soon-to-be Communist North was an event of the greatest significance for Diem’s future and for the future of South Vietnam. Lansdale stimulated it. He propelled everyone else into concerted action. Diem had attempted to set up a refugee organization, and it had mired in committee meetings. The French and the U.S. Embassy had dawdled. Lansdale drew up a plan; got Diem, the U.S. military, and the French all working together; arranged for the Navy to provide a Seventh Fleet amphibious task force for sea evacuation (it brought down more than a third of the refugees); and had the French award Civil Air Transport, a CIA airline run by Gen. Claire Chennault from Taiwan, a profitable contract to assist in the air evacuation. CAT in turn smuggled stay-behind guerrillas and arms and ammunition into the North for Lansdale. Edward Lansdale also brought in volunteers of his own, paid by the CIA, from the Philippines. One character Bumgardner remembered well was a half-American, half-Filipino priest who ran an organization to help the refugees make their way through Viet Minh lines and then to feed them in Haiphong until they could be moved to the South. The priest dispensed counterfeit French and Viet Minh piasters to pay for their food and to bribe any susceptible guerrillas who might hinder the refugees’ flight from their home villages. The Communists became sufficiently annoyed to try to assassinate the priest. His office in Haiphong had shotguns and submachine guns stacked here and there within handy reach.

  Bumgardner was sent to Haiphong to produce stories and photos to demonstrate that the refugees leaving the North, in what Washington called “a convincing tribute to the Free World and an indictment of the Communists,” were not all Roman Catholics. This was not easy to do, because two-thirds of the refugees, over 600,000 were Catholics. Most of the remaining 300,000 also had a special reason to flee. They were the families of Vietnamese officers and soldiers in the colonial armed forces; the families of colonial police and civil servants; Chinese who had Nationalist sympathies or businesses they were afraid would be seized in a Communist state; the Nung tribal minority that had sided with France; and Vietnamese who were French citizens. The Catholics had fought with the French in exchange for autonomy under their bishops in the bishoprics of Phat Diem and Bui Chu in the southeastern section of the Red River Delta. Many of them thus had reason to fear retaliation and wanted to go to a refuge governed by a coreligionist.

  Lansdale took measures to see that those Catholics who were undecided had their minds made up for them. Diem flew north and conferred with the bishops. The priests began to urge their peasant parishioners to flee. One favorite sermon was that the Blessed Virgin had gone South and they had to follow her. Lansdale had his team launch a black propaganda campaign in the North to portray forthcoming conditions under Viet Minh rule as grimly as possible. His men distributed leaflets carefully forged to make it appear that they had been issued by Ho’s revolutionary government, generated rumors, and passed out an almanac of the kind that was popularly sold in Vietnam. “Noted Vietnamese astrologers were hired to write predictions about coming disasters to certain Vietminh leaders and undertakings,” Lansdale’s secret account of his mission said. The day after distribution of an especially grim counterfeit leaflet, “refugee registration tripled,” his account noted. According to one effective rumor, the Americans were going to drop atomic bombs on the Viet Minh after the Geneva deadline for evacuation from the North ran out in May 1955. Some refugees appeared in Haiphong with leaflets, purportedly printed by the Viet Minh, which showed three concentric circles of nuclear destruction imposed on a map of Hanoi.

  The ships of the Seventh Fleet task force evacuated whole villages of Catholics. In all, 65 percent of the North’s Catholics went South. The U.S. government contributed $93 million for their resettlement in 1955 and 1956. The exodus of Catholics provided Diem with a hard core of fanatic followers who had no place left to go. The first reliable troops he acquired to guard his palace in Saigon in September 1954 were Catholic militiamen from the North.

  The work of Lansdale during the pivotal years of 1954 and 1955 proved that one man and his vision can make a difference in history. Without him the American venture in Vietnam would have foundered at the outset. Diem might have been Washington’s choice in Saigon, but he could not have survived without Lansdale at his side. The French were no longer an alternative. They would not have held on in the South indefinitely with their Expeditionary Corps, regardless of the willingness of the United States to underwrite the financial aspect of the burden. The French were emotionally exhausted, and the Arab population of Algeria, where France had nearly a million European settlers living, began to rebel in 1954, thrusting the French into a new colonial war. The likelihood is that the French would have kept the commitment they had made at Geneva to carry out the southern portion of an all-Vietnam election in July 1956. The election was to decide whether a French-sponsored government in Saigon or Ho’s government in Hanoi was to rule a unifie
d Vietnam. The final declaration of the conference carefully stated that the Geneva accords were not an agreement to permanently divide the country and that “the military demarcation line [at the 17th Parallel] is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.” No one has ever disputed that the Communists would have won the election, either honestly or by rigging the vote more adeptly than their opponents in the South because of their superior organization and the larger population of the North. Eisenhower acknowledged in 1954 that if a free election should then be held in North and South Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh would win 80 percent of the vote as the father of the country in the eyes of most Vietnamese. (In any case there never had been, and never was to be, an honest election in either part of Vietnam.) A Communist victory in the 1956 election would have given the French a face-saving means to withdraw their Expeditionary Corps. They could have taken along their nationals and many of the Vietnamese who had sided with them. Had the 1956 election not sufficed, France would undoubtedly have found some other excuse to abandon the South. As painful as this outcome would have been, the United States would have had no alternative but to accept a unified and Communist Vietnam. Eisenhower had already decided that he was not going to send U.S. troops there to replace the French. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, the Army chief of staff, had convinced him that intervention was not practical because of the nature of the country and the political problems, that he would be ordering American soldiers into a morass. With the Korean War just over, the public mood in the United States was also keenly set against American involvement in another Asian war.