In a gesture of goodwill toward the United States, Diem permitted his flag officers to attend a Fourth of July reception at the US embassy. Afterward, CIA operative Lou Conein joined the men, nearly all of whom he had known since his OSS days in 1945, for drinks at a downtown hotel. There, General Tran Van Don informed Conein that he and fellow officers were going to remove Diem and Nhu from power. Conein duly passed this information on to Richardson, who, with the approval of the ambassador, told the former legionnaire to maintain his contacts.
On the evening of August 18, the coup plotters met and decided to ask the president to approve imposition of martial law. They would argue to Nhu and Diem at a subsequent meeting two days later that the decree was needed to enable the military to disperse Buddhist crowds in the nation’s cities. It was clear, they said, that the communists had co-opted the protest movement, a charge Diem was only too ready to believe. Their real purpose, however, was to use martial law to position troops strategically in and around Saigon.
But Nhu had other plans. On the night of August 21, with Ambassador Nolting out of the country, Colonel Tung’s Special Forces, dressed in regular ARVN uniforms, attacked pagodas all across the country. Armed with pistols, submachine guns, and clubs, they flattened the gates of Xa Loi Pagoda in Saigon and began beating monks and nuns with clubs and pistol butts. They then vandalized the main altar and seized the intact heart of the martyred Thich Quang Duc. In Hue, the violence was even worse. At Tu Dam Pagoda, the temple of protest leader Thich Tri Quang, Nhu’s Special Forces soldiers ransacked the building before blowing it up. At Dieu De Pagoda, a Buddhist crowd fought back but was eventually overwhelmed, with 30 dead and 200 wounded. The total number of people killed in the raids nationwide was never confirmed, but estimates ranged into the hundreds. More than 1,400 monks, academics, and other protest leaders were arrested and jailed indefinitely. Nhu knew that the raids would further outrage the Vietnamese and Americans, and he hoped that ire would be directed at the regular military, thus undercutting support for a possible coup. He miscalculated.20
As it happened, at the time of the raids, outgoing ambassador Nolting and incoming ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. were meeting in Honolulu with Admiral Harry Felt, commander of US forces in the Pacific. Bill Colby was there representing the CIA. At that point, the Agency had ruled out Nhu as head of government no matter what transpired in Vietnam. McCone had not made up his mind on Diem, but he tended to agree with Colby, who would subsequently note the danger of discarding a bird in the hand before knowing the “birds in bush, or songs they may sing.” Nolting reiterated his view that the Diem regime was the best choice available and that its overthrow would lead to a communist victory. Colby observed that the best that could be hoped for from a military coup was that the United States and anticommunist elements in South Vietnam would work through “a Naguib first phase” while waiting for the emergence of a “Vietnamese Nasser.” The references were to Muhammed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser. The former was the popular nonpolitical general who had become the first president of Egypt after the antimonarchist uprising of 1953. He was a front man for a younger, nationalist, and politically ambitious group of officers headed by Nasser. Lodge kept his counsel, but in fact he had already set his face against the House of Ngo.21
Washington, DC, unbearably hot and humid, was typically nearly empty in August. Thus it was that on the Saturday following the pagoda raids, a rump of the foreign policy establishment gathered to decide how to respond to the embassy’s request for guidance. Present were Undersecretary of State George Ball; Roger Hilsman, the State Department’s Vietnam expert; Michael Forrestal, an aide to NSC director McGeorge Bundy; and W. Averell Harriman, the veteran diplomat who was then serving as undersecretary of state for political affairs. To a man, the four believed that Diem and Nhu were morally and politically bankrupt and that the United States must abandon them. They prepared a cable instructing Lodge to seize the opportunity to rid himself of Nhu; if the president refused to jettison his brother, “the U.S. must face the possibility that Diem cannot be preserved.” Lodge was also to make clear to the generals that Washington would provide them with direct support during the period between the breakdown of the present government and the establishment of a new one. The cable was cleared with President Kennedy, who was vacationing at Hyannisport in Massachusetts. On Sunday, a copy was circulated to the relevant agencies. As soon as he read it, Colby realized that a major change of policy was in the offing. He phoned McCone, who was vacationing at his palatial home in California. At the DCI’s request, Colby borrowed one of the CIA’s small jets and flew out to brief his boss. McCone, according to Colby, was furious and returned to Washington with him Sunday evening.22
On the following day, August 26, with the full team back in Washington, JFK presided over a stormy NSC meeting. McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, together with the DCI and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, declared their support for Diem and accused Harriman and Ball of blindsiding them. Kennedy wavered, but in the end he instructed Lodge, at his discretion, to publicly announce a reduction of American military and economic aid to Diem’s government, the signal the rebellious generals had asked for. From late August on, the United States was firmly committed to a coup. As Colby noted in Lost Victory, “there was an almost total absence of consideration and evaluation of the personalities who might succeed Diem[,] beyond generalized references to ‘the military.’”23
The day following the NSC meeting, Colby instructed Richardson in Saigon to begin casting about for a replacement if Diem could not be saved. The chief of station did not trust the generals. If and when they came to power, he told Colby, “the Ngos would be lucky to get out of the country alive.” He wanted to see Vice President Nguyen Ngoc Tho succeed to the presidency and the constitution preserved. Don’t be absurd, Colby replied. The “U.S. must win this affair if it goes into it, and it has already decided to do just that. . . . We are confident you will keep [your] eye on this main ball rather than [the] window dressing of civilian leadership.” He wanted, he said, ideas on a “man, team, or false face behind which we can mobilize the necessary effort to continue the main war against the Viet Cong.” Colby had such a person in mind, although he saw him as more of a Nasser than a Naguib. Before leaving Saigon, Colby had suggested to Langley General Nguyen Khanh as a possible replacement for Diem. Both former parachutists, Colby and Khanh had become personal friends during the former’s tour as chief of station. Colby was drawn to Khanh because of his skill at maneuvering between the palace and various generals as well as among the political factions that constantly roiled the waters in Saigon. The general had expressed understanding of, and sympathy for, Colby’s ideas on counterinsurgency and pacification. Last but not least, he had not demonstrated the racism toward the Montagnards that was characteristic of so many of his fellow Vietnamese.24
Policymakers in Washington and Saigon anticipated a coup before the week was over, but on August 30, General Tran Thien Khiem, chief of staff of the South Vietnamese Army, informed General Harkins that he and his colleagues did not have sufficient forces in and around Saigon and did not feel ready to proceed. “This particular coup is finished,” Richardson cabled headquarters.25 The fundamentals of the situation had not changed, however. The Buddhists may have been intimidated, but they were no less resentful of the regime, and the military would never trust the House of Ngo again. The White House was wracked with angst, but Kennedy insisted on leaving the matter in Lodge’s hands. Thus it was that the newly arrived ambassador would be the American who held the fate of South Vietnam’s ruling family in his hands.
In 1953, when Lodge was serving as Eisenhower’s ambassador to the United Nations, a crucial vote on the Korean War had come before the Security Council. The State Department advised the New Englander to vote yes. When Robert Murphy, head of the International Organizations section in State, read the next day that Lodge had voted no, he cabled him: “Apparently, our instructions fai
led to reach you,” he wrote. The ambassador replied, “Instructions? I am not bound by instructions from the State Department. I am a member of the President’s cabinet, and accept instructions only from him.” Ten years later, nothing had changed.26
Lodge, according to Colby, was a disaster as an ambassador. “He had no concept of running a mission,” Colby later told an interviewer. “He was a total lone wolf, and couldn’t waste his time on administration. He took an instant dislike to Diem.”27 In truth, Lodge came to Vietnam not to manage and coordinate, but to rule. He brought with him a military and a civilian aide, Lieutenant Colonel John Michael Dunn and Frederick Flott, respectively, both junior in rank but both entrusted with his personal mandate. Together they ran roughshod over the rest of the mission—or tried to. Lodge did not believe in delegating authority. He anointed himself as sole spokesman to the press for the entire US Mission and insisted on the right to fire and hire any member of the team, including the CIA chief of station. The ambassador had patience neither for the palace intrigues that swirled around the Ngo brothers nor for the bureaucratic maneuverings within his own camp.
President Kennedy knew who and what Cabot Lodge was and had selected him deliberately. As historian Jane Blair has pointed out, JFK saw Vietnam in 1963 as primarily a political problem. His goal was to keep the South Vietnamese ship of state afloat while shielding his administration from excessive criticism. Lodge, a Republican presidential aspirant, would protect his Vietnam policy from partisan attacks. Above all, however, JFK wanted Lodge to deflect a crescendo of criticism coming from a group of young American newspapermen in Saigon. Beginning with the disastrous battle of Ap Bac, this pack of ambitious journalists, led by David Halberstam of the New York Times and Neil Sheehan of United Press International, had led an assault on US support for the Diem regime. They made the Buddhist crisis their own, writing scathing reports about the perfidious Ngo family and the outrages committed by Tung’s Special Forces. Indeed, these young media turks wrote about the situation in South Vietnam with the deliberate intention of promoting a coup. JFK demanded of Halberstam’s editors that they reassign the young reporter, but at the same time he made it clear to Lodge that he wanted him to get Diem and Nhu to clean up their act. Colby certainly thought that the American press corps and the Buddhists’ manipulation of it were crucial. “When that picture of the burning bonze [monk] appeared in Life magazine,” he told an interviewer, “the party was almost over in terms of the imagery that was affecting American opinion. That put enormous pressure on President Kennedy.”28
It was not until four days after he landed in Saigon that Lodge deigned to meet with Diem. He arrived at the palace dressed in a white sharkskin suit and accompanied by twelve aides. The ambassador urged his host to appease the Buddhists and tone down Madame Nhu—Nhu’s outspoken wife, who was considered the First Lady of South Vietnam because Diem had never married, and who had caused a stir by offering matches and fuel if any monks planned future self-immolations. Diem listened to Lodge and then launched into a two-hour diatribe, during which he chain-smoked two packs of cigarettes. The Buddhist protesters represented a small minority of the total population of South Vietnam, he declared. What he expected of Lodge was that he put an end to interference in the internal affairs of South Vietnam by representatives of various US agencies. Lodge feigned ignorance. This would be the last face-to-face meeting between the two men for nine tension-filled weeks. On September 2, Nhu’s English-language mouthpiece, the Times of Vietnam, sported the banner headline “CIA Financing Planned Coup d’Etat.”29
Meanwhile, Nhu had begun openly consorting with the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese. There had been rumors of secret contacts between the South Vietnamese government and the communists before, but the palace had steadfastly denied them. With the French encouraging and facilitating him, Nhu had recently entered into tentative discussions with North Vietnamese representatives concerning the possibility of a cease-fire and a neutralization scheme that would be similar to the 1962 Geneva Accords on Laos. Word of the contacts spread quickly. On September 4, Conein was summoned by Brigadier General Ton That Dinh, the military governor of Saigon, which was then under martial law. Dinh’s direct command of troops in the capital area made him indispensable to the success of a coup. Conein found him “exultant, ranting, raving,” flanked by bodyguards who kept their submachine guns pointed at Conein even during the luncheon phase of their four-hour session. Dinh declared himself the man of the hour who would save Vietnam from communism and who could kill or kidnap anyone in Saigon, including—should there be a move to accommodate the communists—Nhu himself.30
By this point, Lodge had taken Lou Conein and Rufus Phillips—the Lansdale protégé who had stayed on in South Vietnam to advise the government on its Strategic Hamlet Program—into his inner circle. Phillips had turned sharply against the Ngo brothers, as had Conein. On September 13, Lodge cabled Secretary of State Dean Rusk, asking that Chief of Station Richardson be replaced by Ed Lansdale. Richardson, it seemed, had disobeyed Lodge’s orders to cease all contact with Nhu. The State Department and the CIA had no intention of allowing a free radical like Lansdale back into the picture. Nevertheless, McCone, angry though he was, had no choice but to reassign Richardson. In the meantime, Deputy Chief of Station David Smith became acting chief.31
Colby had been monitoring these developments from afar with a growing sense of unease. Diem was apparently in Lodge’s sights, with the Kennedy administration divided and adrift. “Diem might be difficult,” Colby wrote in his memoirs, “but he was the best—and only—leader South Vietnam had.” The Agency’s Far Eastern chief was generally dismissive of the Buddhists. During one of his frequent visits to Vietnam, Colby had attempted to come to grips with Buddhism as a political movement. “I invited one of the leading bonzes to tea one afternoon,” he later recalled. “Resplendent in his yellow robe, he arrived in a polished limousine equipped with immaculate white cotton seat coverings, precisely as one of Diem’s ministers would have.” Their conversation, Colby said, resembled two ships passing in the night. “Not only could I not understand what he was trying to say, I was inwardly convinced that he did not know what he wanted to say,” he wrote in Lost Victory. Luminaries such as Thich Tri Quang were adept at rallying crowds and stirring protests, Colby believed, but they had no idea what to do with the political power that flowed therefrom.32
Colby’s response to the Buddhist crisis is somewhat puzzling. He repeatedly equated it with the sect wars of 1955 in which the South Vietnamese government had subdued the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao, and Binh Xuyen. Rather than placing Buddhism on the same level as Christianity (i.e., Catholicism), as one of the world’s great religions, he seemed to have been relegating it to the status of a sect. There was certainly hard information on the General Association of Buddhists and its goals and organization: CIA dossiers, based on material gathered in July and August, included data on the leaders of the association and their complaints of discrimination by the government in favor of the Catholics as well as conclusive evidence that the movement was free of communist infiltration. Unlike Nolting and Lodge, Colby did not buy the notion that the Buddhist uprising was communist inspired and communist dominated. But he did share his countrymen’s belief that Buddhism was a “soft” religion lacking the discipline and will of the Catholic communion. More important, Colby refused to acknowledge that by the late summer of 1963, Diem had become completely eclipsed by Nhu and that both brothers had lost the support of the military. Those who differed with Colby whispered that it was because the Ngos were Catholic. Colby’s most telling argument was that Lodge and his supporters in Washington—Harriman, Hilsman, and Forrestal—had given no consideration whatsoever to what would follow politically in the wake of the fall of the House of Ngo.33
To make matters worse, it looked as if the ambassador intended to make the CIA his tool in facilitating the fall of the House of Ngo. “There was a clear inconsistency between John McCone’s and my oppositi
on to the move against Diem and Lodge’s use of our subordinates [Conein] to carry out the action we opposed,” he wrote. But, as he noted, the CIA was not supposed to be a policymaking body, and the president’s deferral to Lodge made the Agency available to him to use as he wished.34
On September 23, President Kennedy ordered McNamara and Taylor to South Vietnam to assess the situation. Colby was part of the team. By then, the long trip from Washington to Vietnam—a twenty-four-hour flight in a windowless KC-135 from Andrews Air Force Base, to Anchorage, Alaska, for refueling, and thence to Tan Son Nhut—had become somewhat routine. Lodge was prepared to allow the Taylor-McNamara mission to gather all the information it desired as long as it did not come from the House of Ngo. Knowing of Colby’s close relationship with Nhu and Diem, the ambassador forbade him from calling at the palace or having any contact with high-ranking members of the government. “He did not want the palace to gain any false impression that [the Taylor-McNamara group] offered a potential way around his declared policy of waiting for Diem to come to him with the concessions Lodge thought necessary,” Colby later wrote. The former Jedburgh was outraged, and he sensed that McNamara was displeased, but Kennedy’s Republican proconsul was still in charge. Colby realized that if he could not contact Nhu and Diem, he could not talk with other Vietnamese either, as it would give the Ngo brothers the impression that he was plotting against them. Little did he know that they already had that impression. As the Taylor-McNamara mission was leaving Vietnam, Diem’s chief of special police was reporting that the United States had targeted the president for elimination. According to an Agency informant, the police chief told Diem that “an assistant to the chief of the American CIA [Colby] and about fifty sabotage and assassination experts had been in Saigon for over three months.”35
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