“Pacification” became a term drenched in blood. Borrowed from the French commandos in Algeria by U.S. Army Special Forces activists, it meant to hit an area as hard as possible in order that it would be reduced to rubble—that is, “pacified.” “Pacification” became the battle cry of the dreaded Phoenix program that was operated under the direction of the CIA in later years.
Thompson may not have had that in mind when he sold the idea to Diem, but the Englishman, who had plenty of experience with pacification in the years of rebellion in Malaya, preached a program that could go either way. Thompson traveled to Washington and gave briefings, attended by this author, on the subjects of: (a) British methods of putting down the rebellion in Malaya and (b) his plan for the pacification of the Mekong Delta by the creation of Strategic Hamlets. These discussions were highly confidential. They centered on basic issues and matters of fundamental concern to the Vietnamese.
There has been a Malthusian movement, concealed at all times from the public, to uproot and destroy the existing and traditional system of communal society in many parts of the world. The activists of this movement fear the strength of the peasant and the ways of peasant life. They much prefer a society of dependent consumers. Indochina and Korea were their prime targets during the post-World War II decades.
Around the world and from ages past, “the peasantry consists of small agricultural producers who with the help of simple equipment and the labor of their families produce mainly for their own consumption and for the fulfillment of obligations to the holders of political and economic power.”1
This means that there were two opposite views with respect to the development of Strategic Hamlets. To some, they were an attempt to permit the indigenous population to return to a way of life that had been interrupted by World War II. To others, they were places where the hundreds of thousands of refugees from the north could be settled, or where the residents of certain embattled southern areas could be protected from their local enemies, somewhat in the style of the old Indian palisades of early American times.
At the same time, there was another movement in Asia, little noticed in the West, that supported the concept of the “commune,” or independent village. Mao Tse-tung had come to power in China in 1949 and had adapted Marxism to Chinese conditions by placing the peasantry, rather than the urban proletariat, in the revolutionary vanguard. This was why so many world leaders feared Mao and his work. Then, in 1957, he launched the “Great Leap Forward.” This revolutionary concept, actually a step backward in time, was an unsuccessful attempt to decentralize the economy, chiefly by establishing a nationwide system of people’s communes. This move flew in the face of Soviet communism, which—despite its Orwellian name—was actually an anticommune system, or a commune-annihilator system.
The play of this strange mix of ideas was not lost on the various members of the Kennedy administration. Thompson’s briefings were well attended and hotly discussed. From the start, it was made clear that Thompson’s charter would be limited to matters of “civic action” (another new term, developed from the World War II program of “Civil Affairs and Military Government”), which became a buzzword in Vietnam.
This Orwellian play on words had much to do with the way war-making policy developed in Vietnam. Whereas “civic action” meant just that when used in the context of Thompson’s proposal, in other areas of the vast Pentagon universe “civic action” had been adopted by the army’s Special Warfare section as an increment of what it called “unconventional warfare.”
In Thompson’s basic plan, the main governmental aim of the Strategic Hamlet program would be to offer an attractive and constructive alternative to Communist appeals. As noted above, the very choice of words assured that his concept would be received quite differently by various groups and interests.
Thompson’s strategy, taken from his successful campaign in Malaya, was what he called “clear and hold” operations. An area would be cleared of opposition—that is, “pacified”—and then, as the Strategic Hamlet, held safely, and the natives would be allowed to return to their normal ways. The object of the Strategic Hamlet, as he proposed it, was to protect the villagers.
President Diem bought this British proposal, and it was, on the whole, enthusiastically received in Washington. A plan entitled “A Strategic Hamlet Concept for South Vietnam,” drawn up in the State Department, was well received by General Taylor and presented to President Kennedy. It was at this time that the term “oil spot” entered the military vocabulary. This new concept not only espoused “clear and hold” operations but optimistically proposed that once an area had been cleared and held by the construction of a Stragic Hamlet, the pacified area would expand, like an oil spot on calm water. These new concepts moved forward, and before long everyone on the Vietnamese “desks” was talking “Strategic Hamlets,” “oil spots,” and “clear and hold.” Then Gen. Lionel C. McGarr, the senior army man in Saigon, decided to move ahead with a “test area” where he could establish this new type of “pacification infrastructure.”
By that time, early 1962, Diem saw Strategic Hamlets as a national program in which he could install his ambitious brother Ngo Dinh Nhu as the central figure. He had been assured by that time that the U.S. government would provide the financial support needed, along with U.S. military “advisers.” Up until this time, during the seventeen years of U.S. support of the conflict, any U.S. military personnel sent to Vietnam had been placed under the operational control of the CIA, with the exception of those assigned to the regular MAAG (Military Assistance Advisory Group). As these new “advisers” came upon the scene in Vietnam, their tactic seemed to be “close with and destroy the enemy.” The distinction between this approach and the Thompson concept, which had been approved by the President, became an important factor as the years marched on.
Meanwhile, there were many within the Kennedy administration who began to doubt the advisability of continuing blind support of the Diem regime. Diem made little effort to make his government more popular, and unrest among the people, particularly because of the burden of the 1,100,000 northern refugees, kept the pot boiling.
John Kenneth Galbraith, then ambassador to India and prone to exercise his writing skills on any subject, wrote to his friend, the President: “In my completely considered view . . . Diem will not reform either administratively or politically in any effective way. That is because he cannot. It is politically naive to expect it. He senses that he cannot let power go because he would be thrown out.”
Despite the fact that such thoughts were common among administration officials, the McGarr test program, “Operation Sunrise,” was launched in Binh Duong Province on March 22, 1962. The “clear and hold” aspects of the tactical situation were understood, but when it was learned that a new Strategic Hamlet was to be constructed, the whole project came to a halt.
Diem saw Strategic Hamlets as a means to institute basic democracy in Vietnam, where nothing like that had ever existed before. And he added his own Eastern flavor to the concept: “Through the Strategic Hamlet program the government intends to give back to the hamlet [read “commune” in Mao Tse-tung’s model] the right of self-government, with its own charter and system of community law. This will realize the ideals of the constitution on a local scale which the people can understand.”
To underscore how different Diem’s concept was from that of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, we need to see a line from the Pentagon: “The Strategic Hamlet program promises solid benefits, and may well be the vital key to success of the pacification program.”
Assistant Secretary of State Averell Harriman added to the weight of these issues: “The government of Vietnam has finally developed, and is now acting upon, an effective strategic concept.”
The under secretary of state, George Ball, commented “on the progressive development of strategic hamlets throughout South Vietnam as a method of combating insurgency and as a means of bringing the entire nation u
nder control of the government.”
And the secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, added: “The Strategic Hamlet program was the backbone of President Diem’s program countering subversion directed against his state.”
Nothing could underscore more clearly the conflict that existed on the two sides of the ocean. Diem saw the institution of “basic democracy,” “self-government,” and “community law.” Everyone on the other side of the Pacific was talking about warfare of one kind or another. “Strategic Hamlets” had entered the Orwellian world of “pacification.” In a strange and unique way, they symbolized the essential ideological difference between “the West” and “communism” as expressed in the “Cold War.”
The new program at Binh Duong got off to a bad start. Only seventy families could be persuaded to volunteer for resettlement, a sign that those families were most likely northern Catholic refugees. Other people were herded forcibly into the hamlet, but they were supposed to have been paid for their former land and for their labor in building this new Strategic Hamlet. In this first hamlet alone, $300,000, provided through the U.S. mission in Saigon never reached the families. (One thing we must realize about the Vietnam War is that it created many illicit millionaires.)
By the time the hamlet was settled, it was discovered that most of the military-age males had disappeared. Startling figures reveal what this Strategic Hamlet program really was. First, there was the massive forced movement of more than one million northern Catholics to the south. This disrupted northern families and overburdened the south. Second, the Strategic Hamlet program further disrupted millions of southerners. These planned, insidious programs, so characteristic of the very roots of the Cold War itself, did as much to destabilize Indochina as the warfare that they caused. Although communism or the threat of communism was the usual excuse for the escalation of the war, the real “subversion” and “rioting” were directly related to these mass movements of a once-stable and immobile population from the north and its enormous impact upon the equally stable and settled people of the south.
In February 1963, a report was given to the President that was drawn to appear cautiously optimistic. It was based upon the expectation that all of the materials needed to complete the Strategic Hamlet program would be delivered during the year and that it was nothing more than the slow delivery of materials that had been delaying the success of the program.
In fact, there was little basis for this optimism. There is no way that such a revolutionary program could have been forced upon these ancient, land-oriented people, who had been uprooted from their ancestral plots and thrust, forcibly, into these new hamlets, whether or not the area around them was hospitable to them, to their traditional society, and to their farming methods.
Many considered these new hamlets to be the equivalent of concentration camps. Whereas they were planned as safe havens for the residents to help them protect themselves from raiding parties of starving hordes—then called “the Vietcong”—they actually became prisons for the inhabitants, who dared not leave these hamlets because of pressure from the government.
Knowing what we do now about the Strategic Hamlets, the million Tonkinese “refugees,” and all the rest of the Saigon Military Mission’s make-war mission from the CIA, it is staggering to realize that by September 2, 1963, Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could write, in a memorandum to the President: “Finally, progress continues with the strategic hamlet program. The latest Government of Vietnam figures indicate that 8,227 of the planned 10,592 hamlets had been completed; 76 percent, or 9,563,370 of the rural population, are now in these hamlets.”
The government provided food in vast quantities, medicine, and small-arms ammunition for the inhabitants of these Strategic Hamlets. Because of the enormous number of starving, homeless people wandering around the country, it was inevitable that they would direct their attacks at these well-supplied hamlets. It got so bad that the new hamlet residents would have to leave the hamlet at night as swarms of bandits pillaged these government stockpiles. They were afraid to live there because they were unable to withstand the ever-present threats from the outside.
Diem’s idea of “pacification,” with its “new democracy” and other benefits, never had a chance. Meanwhile, his brother Nhu began emphasizing government control of the peasantry, at the expense of “pacification” as it was understood in Washington. By this stage, the Kennedy administration had begun to experience serious doubts as to whether the Diem government was “winning the war,” or even capable of doing so . . . on these terms and against that form of “close-in” opposition.
Keep in mind that it is difficult to think back to the Vietnam situation of 1961 and 1962 in terms of what we saw in Vietnam between 1965 and 1975. In 1962, what we now call the Vietnam War was a relatively low level paramilitary activity. All of the combat that in any way involved U.S. armed forces and U.S. personnel was a result of the “advisory” role approved by the President.
To certain military observers, it may have been safe to say that the war was going well, and even safe to predict a time when Diem’s forces—with strong U.S. support—would be victorious. On the other hand, there was so much poor planning, corruption, and alienation of the native, indigenous peasants that it appeared there was no way Diem could win and that a Diem-controlled government would be a serious handicap. By the end of 1962, this latter position prevailed in the White House and even in some areas of the Pentagon and State Department.
As the reader will recall from an earlier chapter, helicopters were introduced by the CIA into Vietnam in December 1960. Between December 1960 and March 1963, more than $2 billion in U.S. assistance had been sent in support of the Diem government. By March 1963 the number of U.S. armed forces “advisers” in Vietnam had been increased to 12,000, and there had been sixty-two American deaths.
Up to March 1963, twenty of the helicopters in action in Vietnam had been destroyed by enemy fire, and sixty helicopters had been destroyed as a result of mechanical trouble; twenty-five of the sixty-two Americans who had died there had been killed in helicopter action.
March 1963 was a turning point in this long warfare in Vietnam. During that month the rules of engagement were officially modified to permit Americans to fire at the enemy if they felt themselves “endangered,” without having to wait to receive enemy fire. As President Kennedy said at that time, “We are engaged in a civil conflict and a battle with communism.”
He had dispatched “advisers” to Vietnam, but he fully recognized the reality of the situation and the position they were in.
Faced with the ambiguities of this situation and the misunderstandings of each other on both sides of the Pacific, by 1963 there arose a feeling within the Kennedy administration that the war should be turned over to Ngo Dinh Diem entirely; or, failing that, that Diem should be replaced. By midsummer 1963, Diem had become more intractable, and the latter view dominated.
During an interview with Walter Cronkite that was broadcast by the CBS television network on the evening of September 2, 1963, President Kennedy said: “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the Communists.”
During the broadcast the President made another comment that most Americans seem to have forgotten: “What, of course, makes Americans somewhat impatient is that after carrying this load for eighteen years, we are glad to get counsel, but we would like a little more assistance, real assistance.”
These are very significant statements. Kennedy was saying, as John Foster Dulles had said in 1953, that Americans have been actively involved in Vietnam since 1945. But things were different then: In 1945, Vietnam had just been freed from Japanese wartime control; in 1945, Ho Chi Min
h had declared the independence of a new Democratic Republic of Vietnam; in 1945 there was no government and no country of South Vietnam. The thought that the people of a place called South Vietnam in 1963 had the capability to win a war of independence by themselves was preposterous then as it was when President Eisenhower first proposed the idea in January 1954.
It was in this uncertain atmosphere that the next summer of crises erupted in Vietnam. On May 8, 1963, a mass meeting was held in Hue, the ancient imperial capital of Vietnam, to commemorate Buddha’s birthday. The government saw this demonstration as a challenge, and the Catholic deputy province chief ordered his troops to fire on the mob. Nine people were killed, and many were injured. The following day, in Hue, more than ten thousand people demonstrated in protest of the killings. On May 10 a manifesto was delivered by the Buddhists to the government in Saigon, and on May 30 about 350 Buddhist monks demonstrated in front of the National Assembly in Saigon.
Then, as feelings rose to a fever pitch, Madame Nhu, by now “the Dragon Lady” in the press of the world, exacerbated the problem by announcing that the Buddhists were infiltrated by Communists. Three days later, the press was alerted to be at a main downtown intersection at noon. On June 11, they were horrified to witness the first immolation suicide of a Buddhist monk in protest of Diem’s treatment of his people. Thich Quang Duc’s shocking death alarmed the world and electrified Vietnam.
Shortly after midnight on August 21, Ngo Dinh Nhu’s U.S.-trained Special Forces shock troops, along with combat police, invaded Buddhist pagodas in Saigon, Hue, and other coastal cities and arrested hundreds of Buddhist monks. Nhu had decided to eliminate Buddhist opposition in his own way. More than fourteen hundred Buddhists, primarily monks, were arrested, and many of them were injured.
At the same time, President Kennedy had dispatched a new ambassador, the veteran Henry Cabot Lodge, to Saigon. After a brief stop in Tokyo, Lodge arrived in Saigon at 9:30 P.M. on August 22, 1963. This date marked the beginning of the most explosive and ominous ninety days in modern U.S. history.
JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK Page 37