The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  The rest of the visit was spent with Thé taking Lansdale around to see his guerrillas—“platoon after platoon of barefooted men dressed in the calicot noir pajamas of the southern farmers.” Thé’s men were so impoverished that every time Lansdale went from one platoon to another a runner went ahead of him carrying to the next platoon commander the only “French officer’s shoulder insignia” in the entire camp. But their weapons were immaculately clean, and more munitions were being manufactured in makeshift jungle workshops run by anti-Communist Chinese expatriates. “Outside of the Foreign Legion troops, for whom I have real respect as fighting men, I feel that these troops are the toughest in the country,” Lansdale wrote.7

  A few weeks later, Lansdale received word that Trinh Minh Thé was going to see him at his house in Saigon. When Lansdale stepped outside, he found cars full of French troops who had heard that Thé was coming and were ready to shoot the guerrilla chief on the spot. Suddenly a small sedan turned the corner and began heading toward Lansdale’s bungalow. All eyes examined the car’s occupants, the tension mounting with every yard that it advanced. “The driver was a small man, wearing nondescript khakis, an old hat pulled down over his eyes,” Lansdale noted. “The passenger on the back seat was a fat and prosperous-looking Vietnamese, dressed in a white sharkskin suit, fanning himself with a panama hat.” As the driver sprang out to open the back door, Lansdale saw that it was none other than Trinh Minh Thé. Lansdale escorted the fat passenger, who turned out to be Thé’s interpreter, into the house, while loudly telling the “chauffeur” to go around to the kitchen “where there would be refreshment for him.” Thé had come seeking Lansdale’s help to arrange a truce between his own forces and those of the Hoa Hao general Ba Cut. Lansdale had to explain that he had no influence with Ba Cut. So the fighting resumed. Thé badly wounded Ba Cut; his life was saved only because the French evacuated him to a hospital.8

  A few months later, after more behind-the-scenes negotiations involving Ngo Dinh Nhu as well as Lansdale, the renegade warlord finally agreed to join the national army. On February 13, 1955, Thé and his twenty-five hundred men marched through Saigon toward a reviewing stand where the prime minister and other notables were gathered. The troops wore their black pajamas, faded to a “rusty gray.” The outer ranks wore sneakers, the inner ranks no shoes at all. “The absence of heavy boots made the march seem almost ghostly,” Lansdale wrote, although their weapons remained in excellent shape, clean and ready to be used. A French officer sneered, “Look at what Lansdale calls soldiers!” Lansdale turned around and shot back, in a retort that won him no French friends, “Hold it! You French types were never able to beat them!”9

  Lansdale was feeling triumphal that day as Thé’s men gave him “big grins” and “extra salutes.” Thé’s decision to join forces with Diem was the first “public moment of real fun” he had had since Ramon Magsaysay’s presidential inauguration fourteen months earlier.10

  NUMEROUS OBSERVERS would claim that Lansdale had bribed Thé and other warlords to join Diem’s side. Lansdale always denied it, even if he did occasionally slip up and refer to “payoffs” himself.11 “I know of no bribery of the sect leadership by Ngo Dinh Diem, by France, or by the U.S.,” he said.12 Lansdale insisted that “the most I ever ‘paid’ him was a cup of coffee or a meal when he visited me,”13 and that Thé more than repaid the favor by giving him a pair of mongooses, which his poodle, Pierre, forced to live under the refrigerator, where they took “turns hissing and growling at him.”14 Instead of bribing Thé, Lansdale claimed to have enticed him with a vision of “something he had wanted all his life, a free united country.”15

  The controversy over Lansdale’s relations with the sect leaders was not dissimilar to that involving T. E. Lawrence, a figure to whom Lansdale was now being compared. (The French had taken to calling him “Lawrence of Asia,” which in their minds was hardly a compliment, given how Lawrence had schemed to stymie their colonial designs in the Middle East.) Lawrence had been accused of buying the loyalty of Arab tribal leaders, but a British officer who worked alongside him said, “Lawrence could certainly not have done what he did without the gold, but no one else could have done it with ten times the amount.” In truth, Lawrence was so successful because he had “established himself by sheer force of personality” among the Bedouin tribes.16 In Lansdale’s case, his offers of friendship and his appeals to the patriotism of men such as Thé were not insignificant; previously Thé had refused to take money from the French. But, contrary to Lansdale’s denials, his idealistic appeals were combined with more tangible inducements to “rally” to Diem.

  The entire dispute over whether Lansdale “bribed” Thé and other sect chieftains seems to be more semantic than anything else because Lansdale, at least in private, did not deny providing funds. His own CIA report was to say, “At Ambassador Heath’s request, the U.S. secretly furnished Diem with funds for Thé, through the SMM [Saigon Military Mission].”17 Whether this constituted pay, as Lansdale preferred to describe it, or bribes, the word generally used by others (including his CIA colleagues), is a matter of taste. Published estimates of the total spent by the CIA to win over the sect leaders are in the range of twelve million dollars, equal to a whopping hundred million dollars in today’s currency.18 The CIA’s in-house history says there is “no basis” for this immense figure, an assertion echoed by Lansdale without, however, providing an alternative accounting.19

  Lansdale was willing to spend money not only to win over the sect leaders but even to kill them if necessary. In a section of the Saigon Military Mission report not declassified until 2014, he admitted furnishing two million piastres ($57,000) in a “large suitcase” to Diem to pay a former Vietminh activist who had vowed “to get rid of” Ba Cut “through Vietminh who are close to this Hoa Hao rebel.” The scheme never came to anything, and Diem, “somewhat embarrassed,” returned the money, but Lansdale’s willingness to back the operation exposed a ruthless streak that would surface once again a few years later when he was asked by the Kennedy administration to “get rid of” Fidel Castro.20

  Lansdale was enough of a realist to provide the necessary cash to achieve his objectives, even if it required a murder for hire, but he was so eager to protect his image as an idealist that he was deeply reluctant to admit what he was up to, not least to himself. He was not as naïve and unworldly as he pretended to be, even if he had a powerful ability, which might be traced back to his upbringing in Christian Science, to repress unseemly aspects of reality that he preferred not to acknowledge.

  WHATEVER THE exact amount, the CIA payoffs to the sects were insufficient to avert an uprising against Ngo Dinh Diem. The prime minister had alienated the Binh Xuyen, whom he considered to be “gangsters of the worst sort,”21 by revoking their license in January 1955 to operate the Grand Monde casino, a major source of revenue. He also threatened to end Binh Xuyen control of the Saigon-Cholon police. The Binh Xuyen leader Bay Vien responded on March 3, 1955, by forming a United Front of Nationalist Forces with the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao to oppose Diem. But while the sects were united in their opposition to Diem, they had no consensus candidate to replace him. If he had been overthrown, the most likely consequence would have been unstable rule by an ever-shifting junta lacking popular legitimacy—what, in fact, transpired when Diem was finally assassinated in 1963. Little wonder that a local newspaper referred to the political situation as un panier de crabes (literally a “basket of crabs,” but really meaning “a nest of vipers”), a description that Lansdale heartily endorsed.22 As he later wrote, Vietnam was in the grip of a “sudden madness” that nearly tore the country “apart at the seams.”23

  Much to Lansdale’s dismay, Trinh Minh Thé and another sect general he had wooed, Nguyen Thanh Phuong, were part of the United Front. Lansdale took it upon himself to try to bring them back to Diem’s side. Since Phuong’s chief complaint was that Diem had not fully delivered on his American-financed promise to pay him and his men six million piastres ($171,400)
a month,24 Lansdale’s arguments were undoubtedly buttressed by further offers of aid along with his trademark empathy and understanding. Having finally succeeded in once again winning over the two Cao Dai leaders in an all-night parley, Lansdale drove them over to the American ambassador’s residence on the morning of March 22 for what he assumed would be “just a brief and friendly call.” He was surprised to see that J. Lawton Collins had assembled a phalanx of aides armed with notepads, and even more surprised that instead of welcoming the two wayward warlords back into the fold, Collins began castigating them for their disloyalty. Lansdale cut off Joe Redick before he could translate Collins’s words and abruptly ushered the Vietnamese out the door on the pretext of feeding them breakfast.25

  In a subsequent cable to the State Department, the ambassador petulantly complained that talking with Thé and Phuong “was like trying to reason with two stubborn four-year-old children”: “They were either lying very ineptly or they were alarmingly stupid considering the influence and power they wield. In most instances their accusations were without foundation and their arguments without logic. Trying to determine from them exactly what they wanted was completely futile.”26 In reality, both Thé and Phuong were savvy survivors who were maneuvering for maximum advantage in a Byzantine world of Vietnamese politics that Collins did not understand. The ambassador’s cri de coeur, full of stereotyped insults, was typical of the condescending mindset that had afflicted many American representatives in their dealings with Asians in the past and would do so again in the future as a colonial imbroglio escalated into a larger war. Much of Lansdale’s effectiveness derived from the fact that he did not share Collins’s prejudices: he knew that the Vietnamese leaders, however duplicitous, were rational and that it was imperative to win them over rather than dismiss them with befuddlement and belittlement.

  That Lansdale was able to win back these two Cao Dai warlords was a considerable coup for Diem, but the prime minister still faced a formidable array of foes. By Lansdale’s estimate, the Binh Xuyen had as many as 10,000 troops, the Cao Dai 30,000, the Hoa Hao 50,000. (Other estimates were considerably lower.)27 The sects’ military might became clear when Binh Xuyen troopers in green berets set up checkpoints and sandbagged positions across Saigon. They soon had control of all food supplies moving into the city and had placed mortars within range of the presidential palace. They even had gunboats on the Saigon River.28

  Diem had 151,000 troops of his own, but only 10,000 of them were deployed around the capital, and he could not be sure of their loyalty. Before fleeing to Paris at the end of November 1954, the mutinous General Nguyen Van Hinh had handed over command to General Nguyen Van Vy, another pro-French Bao Dai loyalist. Bao Dai, the chief of state who was widely seen as a French puppet, was collaborating with the sect leaders.

  Lansdale found Diem in his office on Monday, March 29, 1955, poring over large-scale maps of the metropolitan area, pointing out locations where Binh Xuyen mortars had been spotted. There were disquieting reports that the Binh Xuyen had acquired heavy 81-mm mortars that could rip apart the Norodom Palace as if it were a Lego set. Yet Lansdale saw no sign of panic in either Diem or the army troops fortifying the palace grounds. A few days earlier, Lansdale had worried about Diem’s passivity—his tendency to cry on Lansdale’s shoulder rather than to take charge.29 But the crisis brought out the best in the prime minister. “I was struck by his calm,” Lansdale wrote. “This was a man in control of himself.”30

  ON THE night of March 29–30, only a few hours after visiting Diem, Lansdale was awakened at his spacious new home at 65 Rue Duy Tan, eight blocks from the presidential palace, by the sounds of explosions and the “stutter of machine guns and the popping of rifles.” His poodle, Pierre, took refuge in a narrow space under the bed, leaving only “two big eyes” visible. Joe Redick telephoned Diem to see whether he was all right. An aide reported that the premier was checking the troops on the front lawn while still in his pajamas and slippers.31 There had been shelling of the palace but no ground assault. The infantry combat, which Lansdale could hear in the distance, was going on in Cholon, where the Vietnamese National Army was driving back Binh Xuyen assaults. Lansdale called Ambassador Collins to share this information and, at Collins’s request, set out for his residence to help manage this crisis.

  Driving through the streets of Saigon in the predawn darkness, Lansdale saw that “each tree trunk, shrub, alley and fence” sheltered troops whose “weapons and eyes” followed his car as he drove past. At one intersection, he came upon a column of Vietnamese army troops blocked by French tanks. (The French still had thirty thousand troops in and around Saigon.) The Vietnamese commander was loudly remonstrating with the French officers to let his men through, but to no avail. “I could only conclude,” Lansdale wrote, “that the French military wanted the Binh Xuyen to win, inflicting defeat not only on the national army but on Diem and his government.”32

  Collins told Lansdale that, in order to stop the shedding of innocent blood, he had agreed to a French proposal for a cease-fire. Lansdale argued that a “cease-fire now merely put off the day of reckoning for which each side would prepare more thoroughly.” But once again the CIA operative and the four-star ambassador were talking past each other. Lansdale had little choice but to trudge home in the early morning hours as the cease-fire was taking effect. He found both government and gangster forces in combat positions on his block, watching each other warily in the evanescent early-morning darkness. As soon as Lansdale opened the door, Pierre bolted into the street. While Lansdale frantically tried to catch his dog, he heard “subdued laughter” from the soldiers on both sides crouched around the house.33

  FOLLOWING THIS brief outbreak of fighting in late March 1955, an uneasy peace descended on Saigon. Jeeploads of men raced through the streets of Cholon firing submachine guns. “Both sides want to show me pictures,” Lansdale wrote, “of their lads who’ve been fished out of the river with their throats cut.”34

  The French hand in the unrest was obvious to Howard Simpson, an American information officer who drove past roadblocks manned by gangsters to visit the Binh Xuyen headquarters in Cholon; he was particularly struck by one “long-haired officer” in a red sport shirt and camouflage pants, his “gold-capped teeth” clamped around an “ivory cigarette holder,” a cocked revolver in his hand and a holstered automatic on his hip. As Simpson sat talking with his Binh Xuyen interlocutors, he noticed French army motorcycle dispatch riders roaring in and out. A French captain in his shirtsleeves wandered out of the radio room before quickly scuttling away when he saw Simpson. “The French are running the goddamn show,” Simpson muttered,35 a conclusion shared by Lansdale but denied by Lightning Joe Collins.

  Rather than blame the French and the sects for fomenting instability, Collins had joined the French in concluding that Diem was the culprit. The ambassador had never much cared for the prime minister; he viewed Diem as a “small, shy, diffident man with almost no personal magnetism,” hobbled by an “inherent distaste for decisive action.”36 Lansdale thought Collins talked to Diem as if he were a “country squire looking down his aristocratic nose at a bumpkin, and a non-too-clean bumpkin at that.”37 Ironically, now that Diem was moving against the sects, Collins was not crediting him for taking “decisive action” but rather blaming him for “operating practically a one-man government.” On March 31, the day after the inconclusive skirmishes in Saigon, Collins cabled the State Department, “I seriously doubt this can last long.” He argued that “it is, therefore, essential to consider possible alternatives to present situation,” proceeding to list several political figures who could replace Diem.38

  John Foster Dulles told his brother, Allen, that “it looks like the rug is coming out from under” Diem.39 On April 11, 1955, the secretary of state sent Collins a momentous cable, revised personally by President Eisenhower. “In light of your reiterated conviction that Diem cannot gain adequate Vietnam support to establish an effective government and that other men are availabl
e whose designation as Premier would improve the existing status,” it said, “you are authorized to acquiesce in the plans for Diem’s replacement.”40 Dulles then summoned Collins to Washington to work out “a program for replacing Diem.”41 Given the CIA’s recent record of toppling Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran in 1953 and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, that was no idle threat: this was one administration that did not hesitate to remove foreign leaders if it felt that doing so was in America’s interest.

  Before Collins departed, on April 20, 1955, Lansdale asked him what he should say if Diem wanted to know whether U.S. support for him was wavering. Lightning Joe disingenuously replied that Lansdale might “hear all sorts of rumors of other things, even stories that the U.S. wouldn’t support Diem.” But Lansdale was to “disregard such tales” in the assurance “that the U.S. would continue to support Diem.”42 And then Collins flew off to conclude the process of dumping Diem.

  IN WASHINGTON, Collins persuaded the president and secretary of state to go along with a scheme to kick Diem upstairs into a largely ceremonial office of president while delegating real authority to a new premier. At 6:10–6:11 p.m. on Wednesday, April 27, 1955 (7:10–7:11 a.m., April 28, in Saigon), Dulles sent out cables to the U.S. embassies in Saigon and Paris announcing the new policy,43 yet less than six hours later, he sent out another cable retracting his earlier decision and warning the embassies to “take no action whatsoever . . . until further instruction.”44