The first nationalists—the founding fathers of the VCI—appeared as early as 1859 in areas like the Ca Mau Peninsula, the Plain of Reeds, and the Rung Sat—malaria-infested swamps which were inaccessible to French forces. Here the nationalists honed and perfected the guerrilla tactics that became the trademark of the Vietminh and later the Vietcong. Referred to as selective terrorism, this meant the planned assassination of low-ranking government officials who worked closely with the people; for example, policemen, mailmen, and teachers. As David Galula explains in Counter-Insurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, “Killing high-ranking counterinsurgency officials serves no purpose since they are too far removed from the population for their deaths to serve as examples.”6
The purpose of selective terror was psychologically to isolate the French and their supplétifs, while demonstrating to the rural population the ability of the insurgents to strike at their oppressors until such time as a general uprising was thought possible.
In the years following World War I, Vietnamese nationalists organized in one of three ways: through religious sects, like the Hoa Hao or Cao Dai, which secretly served as fronts for anti-French activity; through overt political parties like the Dai Viets and the Vietnam Quoc Dan Dang (VNQDD); or by becoming Communists. All formed secret cells in the areas where they operated, and all worked toward ousting the French. In return, the French intelligence service, the Deuxième Bureau, hired secret agents and informers to identify, capture, imprison, and murder core members of the underground resistance.
In instances of open rebellion, stronger steps were taken. When VNQDD sailors mutinied in 1932 in Yen Bai and killed their French officers, the French retaliated by bombing scores of VNQDD villages, killing more than thirty thousand people. Mass deportations followed, and many VNQDD cadres were driven into exile. Likewise, when the French caught wind of a general uprising called for by the Communists, they arrested and imprisoned 90 percent of its leadership. Indeed, the VCI leadership was molded in Con Son Prison, or Ho Chi Minh University, as it was also known. There determined nationalists transformed dark dungeons into classrooms and common criminals into hard-core cadres. With their lives depending on their ability to detect spies and agents provocateurs whom the French had planted in the prisons, these forefathers of the VCI became masters of espionage and intrigue and formidable opponents of the dreaded Deuxième Bureau.
In 1941 the Communist son of a mandarin, Ho Chi Minh, gathered the various nationalist groups under the banner of the Vietminh and called for all good revolutionaries “to stand up and unite with the people, and throw out the Japanese and the French.”7 Leading the charge were General Vo Nguyen Giap and his First Armed Propaganda Detachment—thirty-four lightly armed men and women who by early 1945 had overrun two French outposts and were preaching the gospel according to Ho to anyone interested in independence. By mid-1945 the Vietminh held six provinces near Hanoi and was working with the forerunner of the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), recovering downed pilots of the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force. A student of American democracy, Ho declared Vietnam an independent country in September 1945.
Regrettably, at the same time that OSS officers were meeting with Ho and exploring the notion of supporting his revolution, other Americans were backing the French, and when a U.S. Army officer traded a pouch of opium for Ho’s dossier and uncovered his links to Moscow, all chances of coexistence vanished in a puff of smoke. The Big Three powers in Potsdam divided Vietnam along the sixteenth parallel. Chinese forces aligned with General Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang were given control of the North. In September 1945 a division of Chinese forces advised by General Phillip Gallagher arrived in Hanoi, plundered the city, and disarmed the Japanese. The French returned to Hanoi, drove out the Vietminh, and displaced Chiang’s forces, which obtained Shanghai in exchange.
Meanwhile, Lord Louis Mountbatten (who used the phoenix as an emblem for his command patch) and the British were put in charge in the South. Twenty thousand Gurkhas arrived in Saigon and proceeded to disarm the Japanese. The British then outlawed Ho’s Committee of the South and arrested its members. In protest the Vietnamese held a general strike. On September 23 the Brits, buckling under the weight of the White Man’s Burden, released from prison those French Legionnaires who had collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation and had administered Vietnam jointly with the Japanese. The Legionnaires rampaged through Saigon, murdering Vietnamese with impunity while the British kept stiff upper lips. As soon as they had regained control of the city, the French reorganized their quislings and secret police, donned surplus U.S. uniforms, and became the nucleus of three divisions which had reconquered South Vietnam by the end of the year. The British exited, and the supplétif Bao Dai was reinstalled as emperor.
By 1946 the Vietminh were at war with France once again, and in mid-1946 the French were up to their old tricks—with a vengeance. They shelled Haiphong, killing six thousand Vietnamese. Ho slipped underground, and American officials passively observed while the French conducted “punitive missions … against the rebellious Annamese.”8 During the early years of the First Indochina War, CIA officers served pretty much in that same limited capacity, urging the French to form counterguerrilla groups to go after the Vietminh and, when the French ignored them, slipping off to buy contacts and agents in the military, police, government, and private sectors.
The outgunned Vietminh, meanwhile, effected their strategy of protracted warfare. Secret cells were organized, and guerrilla units were formed to monitor and harass French units, attack outposts, set booby traps, and organize armed propaganda teams. Assassination of collaborators was part of their job. Company- and battalion-size units were also formed to engage the French in main force battles.
By 1948 the French could neither protect their convoys from ambushes nor locate Vietminh bases. Fearful French citizens organized private paramilitary self-defense forces and spy nets, and French officers organized, with CIA advice, commando battalions (Tien-Doan Kinh Quan) specifically to hunt down Vietminh propaganda teams and cadres. At the urging of the CIA, the French also formed composite airborne commando groups, which recruited and trained Montagnard hill tribes at the coastal resort city of Vung Tau. Reporting directly to French Central Intelligence in Hanoi and supplied by night airdrops, French commandos were targeted against clandestine Vietminh combat and intelligence organizations. The GCMAs were formed concurrently with the U.S. Army’s First Special Forces at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
By the early 1950s American soldiers were fighting alongside the French, and the 350-member U.S. Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) was in Saigon, dispensing and accounting for U.S. largess. All in all, from 1950 through 1954, the United States gave over three billion dollars to the French for their counterinsurgency in Vietnam, including four million a year as a retainer for Emperor Bao Dai, who squirreled away the lion’s share in Swiss bank accounts and foreign real estate.
In April 1952, American advisers began training Vietnamese units. In December 1953, an Army attaché unit arrived in Hanoi, and its officers and enlisted men began interrogating Vietminh prisoners. While MAAG postured to take over the Vietnamese Army from the French, the Special Technical and Economic Mission provided CIA officers, under station chief Emmett McCarthy, with the cover they needed to mount political operations and negotiate contracts with the government of Vietnam (GVN).
Finally, in July 1954, after the Vietminh had defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu, a truce was declared at the Geneva Conference. Vietnam was divided along the seventeenth parallel, pending a nationwide election to be held in 1956, with the Vietminh in control in the North and Bao Dai in control in the South. The French were to withdraw from the North and the Vietminh from the South, where the United States was set to displace the French and install its own candidate, Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic mandarin from Hue. The CIA did this by organizing a cross section of Vietnamese labor leaders and intellectuals into the Can Lao Nham Vi (Personalist Labor part
y). Diem and his brothers, Nhu, Can, and Thuc (the archbishop of Hue), thereafter controlled tens of thousands of Can Lao followers through an interlocking maze of clandestine cells present in the military, the police and security services, the government, and private enterprise.
In Vietnamese History from 1939-1975, law professor Nguyen Ngoc Huy, a Dai Viet politician who was exiled by Diem in 1954, says about the Diem regime: “They persecuted those who did not accept their orders without discussion, and tolerated or even encouraged their followers to take bribes, because a corrupt servant must be loyal to them out of fear of punishment. … To obtain an interesting position, one had to fulfill the three D conditions: Dang [the Can Lao party]; Dao [the Catholic religion]; and Dia phuong [the region—Central Vietnam]. Those who met these conditions and moreover had served Diem before his victory over his enemies in 1955 enjoyed unbelievable promotions.”9
Only through a personality cult like the Can Lao could the CIA work its will in Vietnam, for Diem did not issue from or have the support of the Buddhist majority. He was, however, a nationalist whose anti-French reputation enabled the Americans to sell themselves to the world as advisers to a sovereign government, not as colonialists like the French. In exchange, Diem arranged for Can Lao businessmen and their American associates to obtain lucrative government contracts and commercial interests once owned exclusively by the French, with a percentage of every transaction going to the Can Lao. Opposed to Diem were the French and their supplétifs in the Sûreté and the Vietnamese Mafia, the Binh Xuyen. Together with the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai religious sects, these groups formed the United Sect Front and conspired against the United States and its candidate, Diem.
Into this web of intrigue, in January 1954, stepped U.S. Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale. A confidential agent of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and his brother, Secretary of State John Dulles, Lansdale defeated the United Sect Front by either killing or buying off its leaders. He then hurriedly began to build, from the top down, a Vietnam infused with American values and dollars, while the Vietcong—as Lansdale christened the once heroic but now vilified Vietminh—built slowly from the ground up, on a foundation they had laid over forty years.
Lanky, laid-back Ed Lansdale arrived in Saigon fresh from having managed a successful anti-Communist counterinsurgency in the Philippines, where his black bag of dirty tricks included counterterrorism and the assassination of government officials who opposed his lackey, Ramón Magsaysay. In the Philippines his tactics earned him the nickname of the Ugly American. He brought those tactics to Saigon along with a team of dedicated Filipino anti-Communists who, in the words of one veteran CIA officer, “would slit their grandmother’s throat for a dollar eighty-five.”10
In his autobiography, In the Midst of Wars, Lansdale gives an example of the counterterror tactics he employed in the Philippines. He tells how one psychological warfare operation “played upon the popular dread of an asuang, or vampire, to solve a difficult problem.” The problem was that Lansdale wanted government troops to move out of a village and hunt Communist guerrillas in the hills, but the local politicians were afraid that if they did, the guerrillas would “swoop down on the village and the bigwigs would be victims.” So, writes Lansdale:
A combat psywar [psychological warfare] team was brought in. It planted stories among town residents of a vampire living on the hill where the Huks were based. Two nights later, after giving the stories time to circulate among Huk sympathizers in the town and make their way up to the hill camp, the psywar squad set up an ambush along a trail used by the Huks. When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed that the vampire had got him and that one of them would be next if they remained on the hill. When daylight came, the whole Huk squadron moved out of the vicinity.11
Lansdale defines the incident as “low humor” and “an appropriate response … to the glum and deadly practices of communists and other authoritarians.”12 And by doing so, former advertising executive Lansdale—the merry prankster whom author Graham Greene dubbed the Quiet American—came to represent the hypocrisy of American policy in South Vietnam. For Lansdale used Madison Avenue language to construct a squeaky-clean, Boy Scout image, behind which he masked his own perverse delight in atrocity.
In Saigon, Lansdale managed several programs which were designed to ensure Diem’s internal security and which later evolved and were incorporated into Phoenix. The process began in July 1954, when, posing as an assistant Air Force attaché to the U.S. Embassy, Lansdale got the job of resettling nearly one million Catholic refugees from North Vietnam. As chief of the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission Lansdale used the exodus to mount operations against North Vietnam. To this end he hired the Filipino-staffed Freedom Company to train two paramilitary teams, which, posing as refugee relief organizations supplied by the CIA-owned airline, Civil Air Transport, activated stay-behind nets, sabotaged power plants, and spread false rumors of a Communist bloodbath. In this last regard, a missionary named Tom Dooley concocted lurid tales of Vietminh soldiers’ disembowling pregnant Catholic women, castrating priests, and sticking bamboo slivers in the ears of children so they could not hear the Word of God. Dooley’s tall tales of terror galvanized American support for Diem but were uncovered in 1979 during a Vatican sainthood investigation.
From Lansdale’s clandestine infiltration and “black” propaganda program evolved the Vietnamese Special Forces, the Luc Luong Duc Biet (LLDB). Trained and organized by the CIA, the LLDB reported directly to the CIA-managed Presidential Survey Office. As a palace guard, says Kevin Generous in Vietnam: The Secret War, “they … were always available for special details dreamed up by President Diem and his brother Nhu.”13 Those “special” details sometimes involved “terrorism against political opponents.”14
Another Lansdale program was aimed at several thousand Vietminh stay-behind agents organizing secret cells and conducting propaganda among the people. As a way of attacking these agents, Lansdale hired the Freedom Company to activate Operation Brotherhood, a paramedical team patterned on the typical Special Forces A team. Under CIA direction, Operation Brotherhood built dispensaries that were used as cover for covert counterterror operations. Operation Brotherhood spawned the Eastern Construction Company, which provided five hundred hard-core Filipino anti-Communists who, while building roads and dispensing medicines, assisted Diem’s security forces by identifying and eliminating Vietminh agents.
In January 1955, using resettled Catholic refugees trained by the Freedom Company as cadre, Lansdale began his Civic Action program, the centerpiece of Diem’s National Security program. Organized and funded by the CIA in conjunction with the Defense Ministry, but administered through the Ministry of Interior by the province chiefs, Civic Action aimed to do four things: to induce enemy soldiers to defect; to organize rural people into self-defense forces to insulate their villages from VC influence; to create political cadres who would sell the idea that Diem—not the Vietminh—represented national aspirations; and to provide cover for counterterror. In doing these things, Civil Action cadres dressed in black pajamas and went into villages to dig latrines, patch roofs, dispense medicines, and deliver propaganda composed by Lansdale. In return the people were expected to inform on Vietminh guerrillas and vote for Diem in the 1956 reunification elections stipulated by the Geneva Accords. However, the middle-class northern Catholics sent to the villages did not speak the same dialect as the people they were teaching and succeeded only in alienating them. Not only did Civic Action fail to win the hearts and minds of the rural Vietnamese, but as a unilateral CIA operation it received only lip service from Diem and his Can Lao cronies, who, in Lansdale’s words, “were afraid that it
was some scheme of mine to flood the country with secret agents.”15
On May 10, 1955, Diem formed a new government and banished the French (who kept eighty thousand troops in the South until 1956) to outposts along the coast. Diem then appointed Nguyen Ngoc Le as his first director general of the National Police. A longtime CIA asset, Le worked with the Freedom Company to organize the Vietnamese Veterans Legion. As a way of extending Can Lao party influence, Vietnamese veteran legion posts were established throughout Vietnam and, with advice and assistance from the U.S. Information Service, took over the distribution of all existing newspapers and magazines. The legion also sponsored the first National Congress, held on May 29, 1955, at City Hall in Saigon. One month later the Can Lao introduced its political front, the National Revolution Movement.
On July 16, 1955, knowing the Buddhist population would vote overwhelmingly for the Vietminh, Diem renounced the reunification elections required by the Geneva Accords. Instead, he rigged a hastily called national referendum. Announced on October 6 and held on October 23, the elections, says Professor Huy, “were an absolute farce. Candidates chosen to be elected had to sign a letter of resignation in which the date was vacant. In case after the election the representative was considered undesirable, Nhu had only to put a date on the letter to have him expelled from the National Assembly.”16
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