U.S. policymakers decided the French had lost their will to fight in Vietnam and began to plan to assume the French role in that country. This approach was formalized on August 20, 1954 in National Security Council memorandum NSC 5429/2, which said the U.S. must “disassociate France from levers of command, integrate land reform with refugee resettlement.… Give aid directly to the Vietnamese—not through France.… Diem must broaden the governmental base, elect an assembly, draft a constitution and legally dethrone Bao Dai.”9
Once this decision was made, overnight the CIA’s intelligence about the situation in Vietnam switched. The Agency now portrayed Diem as the miracle worker who was saving Vietnam. To make the illusion a reality, the CIA undertook a series of operations that helped turn South Vietnam into a vast police state. The purpose of these operations was to force the native South Vietnamese to accept the Catholic mandarin Diem, who had been selected by U.S. policymakers to provide an alternative to communism in Vietnam.10 It was a strange choice. From 1950 to 1953, while Ho’s forces were earning the loyalty of their people by fighting the French, Diem, a short, fussy bachelor, was living in the U.S. in Maryknoll seminaries in New Jersey and New York.
Diem arrived in Saigon in mid-1954 and was greeted by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the CIA’s man in South Vietnam and the head of the Agency’s Saigon Military Mission (SMM). Diem was opposed by virtually all elements of South Vietnamese society—Bao Dai’s followers, the pro-French religious sects, the Buddhists, the remnant nationalist organizations, and, of course, the followers of Ho Chi Minh. He had no troops, no police, no government, and no means of enforcing his rule. What he did have was the complete support of Colonel Lansdale and all the money, manpower, weapons, training, propaganda, and political savvy in the CIA’s covert-action war chest.
To create Diem’s government, Lansdale’s men, operating in teams in North Vietnam, stimulated North Vietnamese Catholics and the Catholic armies deserted by the French to flee south. SMM teams promised Catholic Vietnamese assistance and new opportunities if they would emigrate. To help them make up their minds, the teams circulated leaflets falsely attributed to the Viet Minh telling what was expected of citizens under the new government. The day following distribution of the leaflets, refugee registration tripled. The teams spread horror stories of Chinese Communist regiments raping Vietnamese girls and taking reprisals against villages. This confirmed fears of Chinese occupation under the Viet Minh. The teams distributed other pamphlets showing the circumference of destruction around Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities should the United States decide to use atomic weapons. To those it induced to flee over the 300-day period the CIA provided free transportation on its airline, Civil Air Transport, and on ships of the U.S. Navy. Nearly a million North Vietnamese were scared and lured into moving to the South.
Lieutenant Tom Dooley, who operated with the U.S. Navy out of Haiphong, also helped to stimulate the flow of refugees to the South. At one point he organized a gathering of 35,000 Catholics to demand evacuation. A medical doctor, Dooley was a supreme propagandist whose message seemed aimed largely at the U.S. audience. He wrote three bestselling books, and numerous newspaper and magazine articles were written about him. Dr. Dooley’s concocted tales of the Viet Minh disemboweling 1,000 pregnant women, beating a naked priest on the testicles with a bamboo club, and jamming chopsticks in the ears of children to keep them from hearing the word of God, aroused American citizens to anger and action.11 Dr. Dooley’s reputation remained unsullied until 1979, when his ties to the CIA were uncovered during a Roman Catholic sainthood investigation.12
The Agency’s operation worked. It not only convinced the North Vietnamese Catholics to flee to the South, thereby providing Diem with a source of reliable political and military cadres, but it also duped the American people into believing that the flight of the refugees was a condemnation of the Viet Minh by the majority of Vietnamese.
Now the scene had been set and the forces defined. The picture drawn to justify U.S. involvement was that the Communist North was invading the Free World South. The CIA was ordered to sustain that illusion through propaganda and, through covert operations, to make the illusion a reality. Its intelligence, with an occasional minor exception, was only a convenient vehicle to sell the lie to the U.S. bureaucracy and people. Unfortunately, nearly everyone, including later policymakers, was deceived by this big lie. While the plan was never detailed in a single available document, an examination of the Pentagon Papers, plus other related information, demands this conclusion.
A raft of Americans now descended upon Diem. The U.S. Army began training and arming his army. The CIA concentrated on building a government and a police for the new ruler.
Colonel Lansdale formed the Freedom Company of the Philippines to send Filipinos to Vietnam under the guise of a private philanthropic organization to train Diem’s palace guard, to organize the Vietnamese Veterans Legion, to help write the new constitution, to look for promising agent material to encadre the planned programs, and to assist the arriving North Vietnamese.13
Saigon and environs in the summer of 1954 were ruled by two pro-French religious-military sects (the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao) and a bandit secular group (the Binh Xuyen). The U.S. stopped funding the French and funneled all its aid directly through Diem. The sect leaders were subverted by bribes, and when that didn’t work, by killings. The Binh Xuyen did put up a show of force but were quickly defeated in a battle with Diem’s units, which seized control of the capital.
Through the CIA, newspapers in the U.S. learned of Diem’s victory, and stories about the miracle of Diem circulated around the globe. The CIA even wrote a Special National Intelligence Estimate that completely lied about what happened and concluded, “His [Diem’s] success [was] achieved largely on his own initiative and with his own resources.”14
Bao Dai was quickly removed from the scene by a rigged election that Diem won with 98 percent of the vote.
So, within little more than a year of Diem’s return to Saigon, the CIA had completed the imposition of a Catholic premier and the importation of a Catholic encadred army and police to rule a nation that was primarily Buddhist. In 1956 the U.S. government and Diem tightened the new premier’s control by calling off the elections for the reunification of North and South Vietnam that had been agreed upon in the Geneva Accords. They did this because they knew that if the elections had taken place, Ho Chi Minh would have won and the country would have been reunited under Communist rule. Even President Eisenhower admitted, “I have never talked … with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that … 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.”15
Having thus established Diem’s military control over Saigon, the CIA then went about imposing Diem’s rule over rural South Vietnamese. In this process the Agency used people imported from the North to encadre its programs. For example, the Village Self-Defense Corps, a Colonel Lansdale concept, armed North Vietnamese refugees who had settled on land given them under Diem’s land-reform program. The Village Self-Defense Corps years later was renamed the Popular Forces.16
The Agency sponsored another program recruiting young university men from the North to take a census of the population. The recruits soon forgot their census-taking responsibilities and concentrated on gathering intelligence on Communists.
To police the rural areas the CIA, along with teams from Michigan State University, created and trained the 50,000-man Civil Guard whose mission, according to CIA National Intelligence Estimate 63-56, was “to maintain law and order, collect intelligence, and conduct countersubversion operations at the provincial level in areas pacified by the army.”17
The Agency helped Diem develop his political power through creation of the Can Lao Party. Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s brother, headed the party, which required members at all levels to serve as informants for its intelligence-collection programs. The party, as with all other CIA programs, became obsessed with detecti
ng disloyalty and concentrated its efforts on the police function.
At the core of the intelligence-countersubversion network was Diem’s dreaded Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation—a CIA-created security service.18
The rural, predominantly Buddhist South Vietnamese resisted Diem’s unfair rule. The continual police operations to seek out disloyalty to Diem caused more and more peasants to join communist organizations for their own survival. Diem reacted to this perceived disloyalty by passing laws making it a crime to speak against the government or to spread rumors. Such crimes were punishable by death. Bernard Fall, in his book Last Reflections on a War, observed: “On May 6, 1959, the Diem regime passed Law 10/59, which provided for a system of drumhead courts capable of handing out death sentences for even trivial offenses. Thus all South Vietnamese opposition—whether Communist or not—had to become subversive, and did.… ‘Four persons out of five became suspects and liable to be imprisoned if not executed.’”19
In reaction to Diem’s campaign of death against his own people, the southern branch of the Communist Party pressured North Vietnam into supporting their armed revolution. Contrary to the impression generated by Agency propaganda, the war at this stage was not an “invasion from the North” but a local resistance to the despotic Diem regime. Numerous authorities have commented on this subject, and captured Communist documents also reveal this to be true.20
While the Agency was creating all of those “security” programs, it also had to estimate the strength of the communist forces. A captured Communist Party document containing the history of the party stated that its size in the South before Geneva was 60,000 party members (not including members of the mass organizations) with party members in nearly every village except those controlled by the religious sects and ethnic minorities.21 The document said that at that time those in the South had the twofold mission of reorganizing the mass-based organizations and developing military units in absolute secrecy. Beginning with 15,000 dedicated hard-core party members—aided in their organizational efforts by Diem’s ruthless oppression—the party began to rebuild itself from the ground up. Over the years it created an interwoven political, civilian, and military structure and honed it into a responsive revolutionary weapon. At the hamlet level nearly every man, woman, and child was recruited into some organization and motivated to fight Diem and his American backers.
By late 1963 the People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP) and its National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) had declared that in their 30 different organizations they had a membership of 7 million, with the largest front groups being the Farmers’ Liberation Association with 1.8 million members and the Women’s Liberation Association with 1.2 million. These figures were undoubtedly inflated, but U.S. intelligence estimates ignored their existence. To understand the way U.S. intelligence estimated communist strength in South Vietnam at the time, it is useful to review the following chart, included in the Pentagon Papers and prepared by the RAND Corporation:
VIET CONG STRENGTH
1954 – 1964
(rounded to nearest thousand)
Year
Main & Local Forces (Regulars)
Guerrillas, Self-Defense Units, Secret Self- Defense Units (Irregulars)
Source
1955*
10,000
NA
NSC Briefing, 16 March 1956. Open sources give 5-10,000. Weekly Intelligence Digest, 18 May 1956, suggests 10,000 number should be revised to 6-8,000.
1956*
5,000-7,500
NA
Weekly Intelligence Digest, 10 August 1956.
1957*
1,000-2,000
2,000
Weekly Intelligence Digest, 30 May 1958; Weekly Intelligence Digest, 18 July 1958.
1958*
April–2,000
NA
Weekly Intelligence Digest, 19 December 1958.
1959*
2,000
NA
NIE 63-59, 26 May 1959.
1960*
April–4,000 Sept.–7,000 Dec–10,000
3,000 (SNIE 63.1-60)
Weekly Intelligence Digest, 17 February 1961. SNIE 63.1-60, 3-5,000 regulars.
1961*
June–15,000 Sept.–16,000-17,000
NA
Weekly Intelligence Digest, 13 October 1961; Weekly Intelligence Digest, 20 October 1961.
1962*
23,000
NA
Current Intelligence Weekly Summary, OCI 2 November 1962.
1963*
June–25,000
NA
Southeast Asia Military
1964**
June–31,000 Dec–34,000
72,000
Fact Book, DIA/JCS. Based on MACV data. Data not retroactively adjusted.
*Estimate of Viet Cong strength for this period is subject to great uncertainty. The numbers here should be treated as order of magnitude.
**Add approximately 40,000 in the Viet Cong “infrastructure.” The infrastructure is defined as the PRP, PRP Central Committee, and the NLF. See MACV, Monthly Order of Battle Summaries, for a discussion. Also add 23-25,000 in Administrative Service, i.e., staff and technical service units subordinate to various headquarters.22
The chart uses the term Viet Cong as the intelligence community’s rather imprecise name for the Vietnamese communist movement in the South. The figures are based on both Agency and military estimates of the number of communists in the country, but those sourced to NIEs (National Intelligence Estimates), SNIEs (Special National Intelligence Estimates), and the Current Intelligence Weekly Summary of OCI (Office of Current Intelligence) most closely reflect the Agency’s input.
The chart reveals a total lack of appreciation of the size of the movement. In 1954 French intelligence estimated that the communists controlled up to 90 percent of rural South Vietnam outside of the sect domains.23 Yet, until 1964 U.S. intelligence only twice recorded any militia, guerrilla, or other irregular forces. Most glaringly, even after the communists announced the existence of the NLF and its multi-million-person structure, the estimates failed to include a single member of the farmers’, the women’s, or the youth groups. Until 1964 the chart also omits any reference to Communist Party members—the key element in the revolution. Those omissions reveal a lack of understanding of revolutionary methods and forces.
The Agency’s erroneous assessment of the communist movement is best exemplified by a speech Colby gave in Vietnam. In his book, Honorable Men, he talks of a briefing he gave to American civilian and military chiefs in Vietnam in 1968: “To that audience I set forth something different from the usual rundown of Communist main- and local-force battalions.… I outlined instead the structure and functions of the Lao Dong Party and its southern section, named the People’s Revolutionary Party, the National Liberation Front, the Provisional Government of South Vietnam, the Liberation Committees and National Alliance of Democratic Forces, which had made post-Tet [1968] appearances. [Emphasis added.] I pointed out that these had failed to attract much popular support [emphasis added] but they nevertheless were the phantom political skeleton that the Communists would use in any negotiation for a peace treaty or cease-fire.”24
After the war the U.S. government’s leading authority on Vietnamese communism, Douglas Pike, tersely commented that earlier estimates by outsiders of the size of the party in the South had been consistently low. The party in the South (excluding the military and front groups) actually numbered at least 350,000 and may have had as many as 500,000 members.25
Although the CIA consistently underestimated communist strength in rural areas, its expanding and increasingly oppressive programs belied that false optimism. In 1959, William Colby, then chief of Saigon station, convinced Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s brother, to build self-defense forces in rural villages. This program utilized American Special Forces to form Catholic men and women into what were called Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG). Under this program 30,000 CIDG received arms
and developed patrolling strike forces.26
Diem’s police state found its programs unable to control the people. Beginning in 1959, with the assistance of the CIA, it sponsored a program to move villagers into organized communities for self defense. This concept, called “agrovilles,” generated fierce resistance from the South Vietnamese who were forced to leave their homes to settle in the new sites.
Learning little from this experience, Diem’s government, with the CIA in the lead, initiated the “strategic hamlet” program in late 1961. South Vietnamese were forcibly moved into fenced and guarded compounds, and the Special Police weeded out any Communists. An ideal strategic hamlet included a watch tower, a moat, fortifications, and barbed wire. The program infuriated the people whose homes were destroyed to force them into those confined sites. The strategic hamlet program died with the assassination of Diem.
The CIA was a most reluctant participant in Diem’s removal, but other elements of our government demanded it. After several false starts, the coup group with U.S. encouragement deposed Diem in early November 1963. Colby called the American-sponsored overthrow of Diem the worst mistake of the war. He said Buddhists had raised an essentially false issue of religious discrimination.27
Various coup governments took turns ruling South Vietnam following the assassination of Diem. There were six governments in the next 18 months alone.
The Agency continued to develop programs for rural security. First it developed the People’s Action Teams—small teams of local armed men who provided security to the rural villages. This program soon expanded under the government of Nguyen Cao Ky, and its name was changed to Revolutionary Development. Ultimately 40,000 cadres were formed into 59-man Revolutionary Development Teams, which were directly funded and administered by the CIA.
Deadly Deceits Page 17