by Max Boot
LANSDALE BECAME the regular CIA liaison to Diem, which, given the power that the CIA then wielded in American foreign policy, made him in effect the chief American interlocutor with the leader of South Vietnam. Lansdale would regularly visit the palace for long talks with Diem, which were typically held in a small alcove off Diem’s bedroom—a tiny room very much like a monk’s cell, piled floor to ceiling with books and documents.63 His knees almost touching Diem’s, sweat dripping off his brow, Lansdale would show his trademark patience as the Vietnamese leader chain-smoked cigarettes and drank little cups of tea while expounding for hours on his views. Few other Americans could tolerate Diem’s rambling monologues. Among reporters and diplomats in Saigon, a two-hour session was considered a “quickie.” Lansdale’s friend John Mecklin of Time-Life recounted the experience of one “ashen-faced American newsman” who said that “Diem had kept him for six and one-half hours, from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. with no lunch, and that the last ninety minutes had been spent standing in the doorway after the newsman had gotten up to try to leave.”64
What made the one-way conversations particularly hard to endure for most Americans was that they had little interest in the political minutiae that fascinated Diem. Lansdale was different. “I never met another Vietnamese that knew as much about those subjects as he did personally,” he recalled. “When something would happen he would tell me not only who had been involved but go into a family history, telling me who the man’s father was, why he had handled something the way he had, and usually go back about 200 years in history about a particular little place in Vietnam to tell me why the people felt the way they did about things. . . . Amazing detail.”65 Lansdale found that Diem had a “phenomenal memory for details, dates, places, and personal biographies.”66 Unfortunately, Diem’s “facts” were not always right. As Mecklin noted, his information “was filtered through such a morass of selfishly motivated bureaucrats that it was often inaccurate, sometimes seriously so.”67
As he had done with Magsaysay, the soft-spoken American adviser would listen carefully and then summarize what Diem “had said, but in a form stressing the principles involved and enumerating the factors that a man should look at and examine very closely in order to make a decision.” “By laying this out for him verbally,” Lansdale later explained, “it would help him clarify the issue in his mind, so that he could then make a decision. He apparently found this quite useful. That was the basis for our relationship.”68
Even some of Lansdale’s aides found the prime minister to be “prissy,” “authoritarian,” and “pompous.”69 Lansdale, however, saw a side of Diem that few others discerned. He later wrote, “True . . . he was happiest when cloistered with books or papers in his study, but he also often had a twinkle in his eyes—eyes that lit up, were full of life, among intimates. He had a wry wit, [and] made zany, teasing comments that were great fun.” One time, for example, just when Lansdale was most at odds with the French, Diem gave Lansdale a signed photo of himself. The puckish inscription: “To Ed Lansdale, a great true friend of France and the person who has made all Vietnamese love France.”70 Lansdale found Diem not only unexpectedly humorous but also “courageous, and deeply in love with his country.”71 The chief flaw he detected was that Diem “wasn’t a good executive. He tended to want to do most of the work himself, instead of delegating to a member of his personal staff or someone.”72
Lansdale tried to connect Diem more directly with the problems of the Vietnamese people by pushing the reclusive prime minister to leave his office and go out “into the provinces and streets” to talks with “people from all walks of life.”73 On infrequent occasions, Diem took his advice, but such forays did not change his impulse to rule in an aloof and autocratic fashion. Lansdale had even less success when he tried to humanize Diem by urging him to try to reconnect with, and marry, the girl he had loved in his youth. He suggested that the premier follow the local custom in Hue of taking her for a boat ride on the Perfume River while he serenaded her with a mandolin. Diem subsequently told Lansdale that he went to her house in Hue but lacked the nerve to ring the doorbell, even though he was the leader of the country and could have barged in with a security detail if he had so desired.74 He was, Lansdale concluded, a “shy, modest sort of person.”75
As their relationship deepened, Lansdale was invited to Ngo family gatherings—the real nexus of power in South Vietnam. Although Diem as prime minister sat at the head of the table at family meals, his older brother, Bishop Thuc, “usually had the final, positive word on any subject under discussion.” Both Thuc and Diem were “trenchermen,” Lansdale noted. While they were digging into their food, Diem’s handsome younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu (pronounced no-din-new), who had studied as an archivist in France and “was looked upon as the intellectual in the family,” would expound “on his theory of why some current event had happened.”76 Nhu’s young and alluring wife, Tran Le Xuan (better known as Madame Nhu), also spoke up forcefully, in contrast to her more reserved sisters-in-law. Diem listened to his family more than to any outsider. That Lansdale was sometimes invited to join them was a mark of high favor.
Lansdale had gotten close to Diem, just as he had intended. But would it do any good? In the summer of 1954, with the truculent French intent on preserving their influence even after the end of their sovereignty, the ascendant Communists eager to claim the entire country as their rightful reward, and the zealous religious sects determined to maintain their hard-won autonomy, few informed observers thought that Diem would last until the summer of 1955. It would be up to Lansdale to help him build a new state out of the ruins of the French empire.
14
The Chopstick Torture
You don’t know shit from shinola about what is going on.
—LOU CONEIN
WHILE Ngo Dinh Diem was still settling into the neoclassical Gia Long Palace, international negotiators half a world away were continuing their efforts to resolve the future of his country. The talks took place in the severe-looking Palais des Nations in Geneva, originally constructed in the 1930s to house the ill-fated League of Nations. Ariana Park, the parcel of land on which it stood, had been donated to the city in 1890 by a prominent Swiss publisher who had demanded, as a condition of his bequest, that peacocks be allowed to freely wander its beautifully manicured grounds. As brightly feathered birds strutted and preened across the lawn, inside the Palais foreign ministers in dark suits strutted and preened before an international audience.
The talks had taken on added urgency with the ascension in Paris of the liberal lawyer and politician Pierre Mendès-France. Taking office as prime minister on June 18, 1954, he dramatically pledged to give up power if the Indochina conflict was not settled by the end of the day on July 20, and in fact the final issues were resolved that very day. The French and Vietminh representatives agreed to partition Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, keeping Hue and Da Nang out of Communist hands, much to Ho Chi Minh’s consternation. Nationwide elections were to be held no later than July 1956 to decide on a government for the whole country. For the next three hundred days, the population could move freely between North and South, with French forces pledged to leave the North and Vietminh forces the South. Cambodia and Laos would become independent states with non-Communist governments.
Although the Geneva Conference was supposed to create two temporary “withdrawal zones,” it actually birthed two new nations: North Vietnam, with thirteen million people, and South Vietnam, with twelve million. In the process, it created a monumental challenge for both Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem—first to consolidate their authority and eventually to reunify the country. Ho Chi Minh, as the leader of a large, victorious army and a powerful political party, had a substantial head start. Diem, by contrast, commanded little beyond the walls of his own palace. The Vietnamese National Army was ineffectual and of dubious loyalty. Much of the countryside was dominated either by the Vietminh or by sect armies. “We didn’t think it would last,” a twenty-four-year-old a
ide to Diem recalled, “but we were young and idealistic.”1
Lansdale was one of the few people who thought “there was still a fighting chance.”2 In top-secret cables to his superiors, he urged that “in order to construct a Free Vietnam which can be an effective bulwark against further Communist aggression in Southeast Asia, the United States must accept a dominant and direct role in aiding the country.”3 It was a role that he was more than happy to take on himself. Pondering the implications of the Geneva Accords, Lansdale concluded “that a number of us in Vietnam had been sentenced to hard labor for the next two years.”4
TO ASSIST him in “saving the world,”5 as he sardonically and habitually put it, Ed Lansdale asked for assistance from his CIA superiors. He would soon assemble a twelve-man team, eventually growing to twenty, that would be a cross between the Dirty Dozen and the Keystone Kops. Their highly classified mission: “to undertake paramilitary operations against the enemy and to wage political-psychological warfare.”6
The first and most colorful arrival was Major Lucien “Lou” Conein, a “stocky” French-born CIA officer with a “leathery face,”7 “bushy eyebrows,”8 and limpid blue eyes who had already developed a reputation as a “wild man.”9 Given Conein’s boozy proclivity for mythologizing his own life, Great Gatsby style, it was difficult to know where reality ended and the legend began. A superb storyteller, especially if fueled by pear brandy, Conein himself cautioned, “Don’t believe anything I tell you; I’m an expert liar.”10
Some facts, however, appear indisputable. Conein was born in Paris in 1919. When he was five, his father died in a car accident and his penniless mother put him on a ship by himself to the United States, with a tag around his neck attesting to his identity and destination. He was to be raised by his aunt, a French war bride from World War I who had settled in Kansas City. With times hard during the Great Depression, Conein left high school in 1936 to work as a printer and typesetter while also serving in the Kansas National Guard.11 Once World War II broke out, he traveled back to France to join the regular French army—not the Foreign Legion, as he later boasted. After the fall of France in 1940, he returned to the United States, where he joined the U.S. Army and the OSS.
On August 15, 1944, Conein arrived back in southwestern France as the leader of a Jedburgh team to aid the Allied landing in southern France. “Naturally strong, in excellent shape, and recklessly brave,” a journalist friend later wrote, “he liked blowing up things and was good at it.”12 Among the contacts he made were members of the Corsican Brotherhood crime syndicate, which operated an international narcotics network out of Marseille. The gangsters called him Luigi, giving rise to an enduring nickname.
In July 1945, with the war in Europe over, Conein infiltrated Indochina to attack Japanese forces at the head of an OSS squad.13 He entered Hanoi on August 22, 1945, and met his future foes, Ho Chi Minh, a “fascinating man,” and Vo Nguyen Giap, a “brilliant sonofabitch.” “Now Ho, the second time I met him,” Conein said, “if he’d asked me to join the Party, I would have signed.” His only complaint about Ho and Giap: “I was going to die of thirst. Goddamn bastards gave me tea! . . . And I wanted beer!”14
Immediately after the war, Conein was dispatched to Germany to run agents behind the Iron Curtain for the OSS’s successor organizations. It was during this period that he lost two fingers on his right hand—and not because of some daring commando exploit, as commonly assumed. Conein had been driving with a girlfriend, reportedly “his best friend’s wife,”15 when their car broke down. He opened the hood to figure out the problem. She started the car prematurely, and the motor sliced off two fingers.
As if plucked from the pages of a novel, Lou Conein was an irrepressible character with a fondness for dark deeds and practical jokes. He had a violent temper, a drinking habit, and an eye for the ladies. In Vietnam, where he arrived for the second time at the age of thirty-six in 1954, he would meet and marry his third wife, an exotic young woman of French-Vietnamese ancestry. He was lauded by his colleagues for his loyalty and professionalism, his charm and his direct manner of speaking.
Luigi and Lansdale hit it off, in their own manner. As Conein later said, “Lansdale was a very strange air force colonel, and I was a very strange infantry parachute major.”16 One fellow team member recalled that Conein opened most of their meetings with “ ‘Godammit, Colonel,’ then saying, in effect, ‘You don’t know shit from shinola about what is going on.’ This was usually followed by an equally blustery rejoinder from Lansdale about Conein failing to keep him adequately informed. Then they would get down to business.”17 Bluster aside, each man respected and valued the other—Conein for Lansdale’s skills at political and psychological warfare, Lansdale for Conein’s commando and agent-running skills. But Ed was under no illusions about his friend Lou. He referred to him privately as “the Thug.”18
THE GENEVA ACCORDS forbade the dispatch of additional foreign military personnel to Vietnam after August 11, 1954. To beat that deadline, CIA headquarters, flush from its recent successes in Iran, the Philippines, and, most recently, Guatemala (where the leftist president Jacobo Arbenz had been overthrown in June), hastily searched for reinforcements besides Conein who could be sent to abet Lansdale. He had asked for experts in “psywar” and “civic action.”19 Instead, he got “an ideal crew for guerrilla combat, for blowing up things, for jumps behind enemy lines,” selected presumably by “personnel officers in Washington who must have had a Korean-style conflict in mind” and who were ignorant “of a Communist ‘people’s war’ such as the Vietminh waged.”20 This was a sign of the rampant confusion in Washington, which was to hinder American operations in Vietnam in the years ahead, about how to counter guerrilla warfare, an activity as dissimilar from conducting guerrilla warfare as police work is from robbery. Yet by pure serendipity some of Lansdale’s new recruits turned out to be superbly fitted for the task at hand.
Typical of these new arrivals was Rufus Phillips III, a strapping, clean-cut twenty-four-year-old Virginian who had played football at Yale. Bored with law school at the University of Virginia, he decided to drop out and serve his country, exchanging his college tweeds for army fatigues. He was trained as a paratrooper officer by the Army and then was sent by the CIA to South Korea. He was not there long before he was dispatched “on a priority basis” to Saigon, apparently because he spoke some French. “Blinking into the blazing heat of the early afternoon,” he stepped off an Air Force C-47 at Tan Son Nhut Airport on August 8, 1954, looking the very embodiment of youthful American vigor and innocence, his uncreased face free of any suggestion of deceit or guile. From there he went to his quarters at the Hotel Majestic on the Saigon waterfront: five stories, yellow stucco, ceiling fans in the lobby, “excruciatingly slow iron-cage elevators,” rooms with no air-conditioning but plenty of geckos.21
Phillips and nine other recent arrivals spent a week or two hanging around the Majestic until Lansdale came to meet them in a bedroom that had been swept for “bugs”—microphones, not actual insects, which remained plentiful. Lansdale, Phillips saw, “was forty-six years old, of medium height and build, and was dressed in khaki shorts, knee socks, and a short-sleeved uniform shirt with an air force officer’s hat worn at a slightly rakish angle. I noticed crew-cut hair, a high forehead, penetrating eyes, a throat with a prominent, slightly swollen Adam’s apple, and a brush mustache. He seemed very military yet accessible at the same time.”22 “After shaking hands with each of us,” Phillips recalled, Lansdale began speaking “quietly in his throaty voice”:
He couldn’t tell us what we would be doing yet. He had no office and was operating out of a small house. Soon he would interview us individually to begin making assignments. . . . Our job was to save South Vietnam, but he couldn’t tell us exactly how we were going to do that. The present situation was very confused. We had to be patient. With these cryptic statements he gave us a half smile and was gone. I didn’t know what to make of him or our situation, and neither did anyone else. I
had expected a clear-cut mission; it was a disappointing start. “Save South Vietnam”—how in the world were we going to do that?23
Eventually the members of what would become known as the Saigon Military Mission would make their way, one by one, to receive their instructions at Lansdale’s Rue Miche bungalow. There they would find not only Lansdale but his new housemate, Naval Reserve Lieutenant Joseph P. Redick, who would become his executive assistant and de facto chief of staff. Thirty-eight years old, Joe Redick had a PhD in French literature and linguistics and had served during World War II as a Japanese-language linguist in the Navy. No longer captivated by Molière and Flaubert, he had joined the CIA after the war. He took over translating for Lansdale and dealing with various administrative matters. “A brown-haired man of medium height and build,” Redick “had the manner of a schoolmaster, precise and punctilious,” a journalist wrote.24 But while “soft-spoken” and “professorial,” he was also, Lansdale noted, “the deadliest shot on the team.”25
Gradually, in their conversations with Lansdale, the team members began to find a purpose. They would be given assignments and sent to live in various apartments and houses around the capital. Phillips was told to help the G-5 psychological warfare department of the Vietnamese National Army. He objected that he didn’t know anything about psychological warfare, so Lansdale gave him a book on the subject and a vague edict “to make friends, see what they were doing, and figure out how to help.”26 Lansdale seldom gave instructions more exact than that; a believer in professional as well as societal freedom, he allowed individual team members free rein to exercise their initiative, and he ran the entire team on an egalitarian basis rare in the military. Phillips saluted Lansdale once in his entire life—when he first showed up at Rue Miche and announced that he was reporting for duty.27