JFK (17 page)

At times the Saigon River, the only supply channel into South Vietnam, became impassable as a result of enemy attacks and the number of ships that had been sunk in the channel. The airport at Tan Son Nhut was ringed with coils of barbed wire. Despite this precaution, the French World War II aircraft parked there were destroyed by explosions set by Vietminh sappers night after night. The entire country was seething with underground warfare.

This was the climate in which the Saigon Military Mission began operations. The Geneva accords called for a political division of the 1,600-mile-long country at the 17th parallel—roughly an equal half-and-half split, north and south. During the early months of its existence, the Saigon Military Mission reported that its first official task was “to create a refresher course in combat PsyWar. . . and Vietnamese army personnel were rushed through it.” The report was written just as though there were a South Vietnam and a South Vietnamese army—neither of which existed in any form until at least July 21, 1954. But that wasn’t exactly what the SMM was doing anyhow.

The Saigon Military Mission began operations on the ground in Indochina on June 1, 1954. Ngo Dinh Diem, the newly appointed president, arrived in Saigon on July 7, 1954. How are a new government, and a new nation, created? How does a man who has lived in exile outside of a country for years (and keep in mind the fact that South Vietnam had never been a country) come back, under the auspices of a totally foreign nation (the United States), and all of a sudden assume the role of president? Where does his government infrastructure and its people come from? Where do his police and army come from? Where does the money come from?

In other words, here was an ancient section of Asia with more than 30 million people divided over millennia into villages, regions, and loosely knit nations. Except for the ten-year-old Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which had never had an opportunity to get itself organized in peace, this entire region had no government. The French, who had provided for the constabulary, had gone. The Chinese, who for centuries had provided for the simple village economy, were frustrated and, under Diem, were being sent away. What remained was near anarchy. The fighting and rioting were actually a form of basic banditry, banditry to obtain the most basic needs of life. It was not even a civil war.

This is where the Saigon Military Mission stepped in and, in a series of adroit political moves, helped Diem gradually extend his authority in the creation of a central government. The SMM’s greatest weapon was a blank U.S. government checkbook from the CIA that enabled the mission to do, and to buy, anything.

What was done in those earliest days of 1954 set the stage for the warfare that followed over the next twenty years. During the first two and a half years of that period, no American was closer to the Diem brothers (Ngo Dinh Nhu was the head of South Vietnam’s CIA counterpart and the strongman of the new country) than Ed Lansdale. He became concerned that the Public Administration Advisory Program planned by the American embassy was going to be too slow and that something had to be done quickly to fill the void left by the French and the Vietminh, who had returned to the north after the Geneva agreements were signed, and to make Diem’s new administration effective without delay. What he recommended and what was done deserve a few words.

Lansdale called this his “Civic Action” program. He describes it as a “cycle including not only political indoctrination, physical toughening, and learning to use tools at the training camp, but a further period of service in a hamlet or village where they would help the inhabitants build schoolhouses, roads, bridges, pit latrines, and similar public works, as well as help establish self-government.” This is an interesting development for an organization that had been created to go to Vietnam and “raise hell,” to use Foster Dulles’s words. Lansdale was taking a page out of his past.

Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Lansdale had joined the Office of Strategic Services. He said later that he left that organization and joined U.S. Army Intelligence. It has been my experience that few men have actually left an intelligence organization and joined the military. More likely, they have simply arranged things so that they could exploit “military” cover.

Be that as it may, during World War II, after the Italian army had surrendered, we learned that during the Fascist dictatorship the cities and towns of Italy had been so long without effective government that they needed assistance in order to reestablish some sort of local administration. The army set up units for this work, called Civil Affairs and Military Government. These CAMG units proved so successful that they continued on into the north of Europe as the Allied armies rolled into Germany.

In a little-known development, the OSS noted what was being done and quite secretly began to develop a similar capability for Asia. As you may recall, General MacArthur had not permitted the OSS to operate in the Pacific Theater. But the OSS managed to get into the Pacific with its Civil Affairs and Military Government idea via U.S. Navy channels. A special school was opened on the Princeton University campus, followed by language schools at Monterey, California. With the surrender of Japan, this program came to an abrupt end. However, certain observant people—such as Lansdale and his boss, Gen. Richard Stilwell—realized the potential for such an activity during the Cold War. In 1960, Lansdale, Gen. Sam Wilson, and I wrote much of that doctrine into the new Army Special Forces manual.

When Lansdale was sent to the Philippines in 1950, he created a Civil Affairs Office there. He had prevailed upon President Ramon Magsaysay to create a psychological-warfare division as part of his own presidential staff and then had named it the “Civil Affairs Office.” Here is no place to develop this relationship further. But it should be noted that this novel military task—if ever it really was military—began with WWII and then moved right into the Cold War under the sponsorship of the CIA.

Inevitably, Lansdale moved this concept of civil affairs to Vietnam with him. Under Gen. John W. O’Daniel, the head of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), there were four staff divisions: Army, Navy, Air Force, and Pacification. Lansdale headed Pacification, which ostensibly had a civil affairs-type role. However, the Vietnamese objected violently to the word “pacification.” They well knew that it had been a most sinister French colonial practice, devised by Gen. Louis-Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey in North Africa and used later by the Chinese in Northern Indochina, meaning that a region was “pacified” when all of its people had been killed. Other parts of the civil affairs program became known as the Strategic Hamlet project of later years. And, before the war was over, the CIA had set up the Phoenix program, supposedly along civil affairs lines; actually, it became one of the most brutal and murderous creations of the war. As a result of the Phoenix program alone, tens of thousands of Vietnamese were killed.

It is necessary to understand this side of the Vietnam campaign in order to realize why we were never able to win the minds and hearts of the people and why this type of warfare did not lead to victory. It reminds us again of the days of the British East India Company and its members’ lack of concern over genocide because of their inbred training in the theories of Malthus and Darwin. (“These gooks will never be able to feed themselves anyhow, so why does it matter if they die? And, we are the fittest anyhow.”) These are strong forces once inbred, and they show themselves in such campaigns as that which occurred in Indochina between 1945 and 1975 and again in the Middle East “Gulf War” of 1991.

Almost from the beginning, Diem was faced with an attempted coup d’état. This threat was ended when the CIA bought off Gen. Nguyen Van Minh and other rivals and packed them off to Paris. But this did not get Diem a needed army and a palace guard for his own protection. There were in the vicinity of Saigon some independently powerful sects. One of them was Cao Dai. By early 1955, the CIA was able to buy off the leader of this sect and place his army under Diem. Then, in June 1955, the army of another sect, the Hoa Hao, was defeated with money—its leader was bought off and his forces joined the government army. A third sect, the Binh Xuyen, better known as the “Binh Xuyen Bandits,” had been running the vice racketeering and the casinos in Cho Lon, a suburb of Saigon.

The CIA was able to arrange for its leader, the “Big Bandit,” Le Van Vien, to give up his forces and travel to Paris. All of a sudden there were a lot of wealthy ex-generals from Vietnam on the French Riviera. In Asia, as in most of the rest of the world, nothing talks like the American dollar, and the SMM checkbook had begun to create a government army for the almost defenseless, and totally powerless, Ngo Dinh Diem.

I am aware of the fact that most of the history books about the earlier days of warfare in Vietnam present rather elaborate accounts of how the Diem administration acquired these “sect” armies. That had to be the “cover story.” I have talked at great length with Lansdale on this subject. I was in Vietnam myself during those days, and I know that the “sect” armies, which were actually nothing more than modest paramilitary forces, had been easily bought up by the American dollar as a price of doing business in Vietnam. It is interesting to read Lansdale’s account in his own book,
In the Midst of Wars
, and the account in his biography,
Edward Lansdale,
by Cecil B. Curry. Both of these books are burdened with a very heavy coating of “cover story” over these events and cannot be taken as realistic accounts.

Most Asian armies of that type are no more than groups of men with families that are one day ahead of starvation. They have joined the army for a bowl of soup and some rice, per day, for themselves and their destitute families. It was this kind of army that the Saigon Military Mission said it was rushing through a course in “Combat PsyWar,” among other things.

One of the first “classes” of these troopers was flown to the vicinity of Hanoi, put in native garb, and told to run around the city spreading anti-Vietminh rumors. They were ordered to pass out leaflets that had been written by members of the Saigon Military Mission and to perform various acts of sabotage, such as putting sugar in the gas tanks of Ho Chi Minh’s trucks and army vehicles. Later, the Saigon Military Mission discovered that these “loyal” troops usually just melted away and lined up for soup with some of Ho Chi Minh’s forces.

By midsummer more men had joined the SMM, and its mission was broadened. Its members were now teaching “paramilitary” tactics—today called “terrorism”—and doing all they could to promote the movement of hundreds of thousands of “Catholic” Vietnamese from the north with promises of safety, food, land, and freedom in the south and with threats that they would be massacred by the Communists of North Vietnam and China if they stayed in the north.

This movement of Catholics—or natives whom the SMM called “Catholics”—from the northern provinces of Vietnam to the south, under the provisions of the Geneva Agreement, became the most important activity of the Saigon Military Mission and one of the root causes of the Vietnam War. The terrible burden these 1,100,000 destitute strangers imposed upon the equally poor native residents of the south created a pressure on the country and the Diem administration that proved to be overwhelming.

What Americans fail to realize is that the Southeast Asian natives are not a mobile people. They do not leave their ancestral village homes. They are deeply involved in ancestor worship and village life; both are sacred to them. Nothing could have done them more harm than to frighten them so badly that they thought they had a reason to leave their homes and villages.

These penniless natives, some 660,000 or more, were herded into Haiphong by the Saigon Military Mission and put aboard U.S. Navy transport vessels. About 300,000 traveled on the CIA’s Civil Air Transport aircraft, and others walked out. They were transported, like cattle, to the southernmost part of Vietnam, where, despite promises of money and other basic support, they were turned loose upon the local population. These northerners are Tonkinese, more Chinese than the Cochinese of the south. They have never mixed under normal conditions.

There was no way these two groups of people could be assimilated by a practically nonexistent country. It is easy to understand that within a short time these strangers had become bandits, of necessity, in an attempt to obtain the basics of life. The local uprisings that sprung up wherever these poor people were dumped on the south were given the name “Communist insurgencies,” and much of the worst and most pernicious part of the twenty years of warfare that followed was the direct result of this terrible activity that had been incited and carried out by CIA’s terroristic Saigon Military Mission.

Moreover, these 1,100,000 Tonkinese Vietnamese were, of course, northerners—that is, the “enemy” in the Vietnamese scenario. However, since the Diems were more closely affiliated with natives of the north than the south, it was not long before a large number of these so-called “refugees” had found their way into key jobs in the Diem governmental infrastructure of South Vietnam.

When one thinks about this enormous man-made problem for a while, he or she begins to realize that much of the Vietnamese “problem” had been ignited by our own people shortly after the Geneva Agreements were concluded. Nothing that occurred during these thirty years of warfare, 1945-75, was more pernicious than this movement of these 1,100,000 “Catholics” from the north to the south at a time when the government of the south scarcely existed. (The figure of 1,100,000 used here is from a John Foster Dulles speech while he was secretary of state.)