Shadow Warrior (33 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 opposition 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.
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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.”
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On October 2, Lou Conein and General Tran Van Don bumped into each other at the Saigon airport; Don asked the CIA operative to visit him at Nha Trang. From this point on, Conein was the mission's sole contact with the coup plotters. Both the station and the embassy would have preferred someone else; as Bob Myers, Colby's lieutenant, put it, Conein was one of the “sitting around the bar people,” a relic from an earlier age. Indeed, “Luigi,” who was usually in some stage of inebriation, was notorious. On one occasion when Taylor was ambassador, Conein had become enraged at the airport when his car would not start, pulled out his .45, and blasted away at the engine. Taylor sent him out of the country for a time. Later, during one of Saigon's rooftop parties, Conein attempted to get the attention of a pal entering the hotel by dropping a flowerpot off the roof. The missile just missed hitting Ambassador Nolting on the head. But the mission had little choice. The generals had made it clear that Conein would be their only acceptable interlocutor. David Smith ordered his operative to go on the wagon for the duration.
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During the first week of October, USAID announced that it was suspending payments to the South Vietnamese government, and the CIA withdrew financial support from the Vietnam Special Forces. Diem and Nhu had Tung draw his 5,000-man force more tightly around the palace. General Don, speaking for the conspirators, told Conein to expect a coup no later than November 2. On October 27, he told him that the conspirators now believed that “the entire Ngo family had to be eliminated from the political scene in Vietnam.” The question of what exactly “elimination” meant had already come up at the CIA. Smith had recommended to Lodge that “we not set ourselves irrevocably against the assassination [of the Ngo brothers], since the other two alternatives mean either a bloodbath in Saigon or a protracted struggle which could rip the Army and the country asunder.” McCone and Colby immediately ordered Smith to stand down; the Agency could not condone assassination without ultimately being saddled with responsibility for it.
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Also on October 27, Diem finally approached Lodge, inviting him to come to the presidential mountaintop retreat at Dalat to discuss Vietnamese-American differences. During the ensuing meeting, the ambassador reiterated
his demands that Diem's government release the Buddhist prisoners from jail, cease its discrimination against the religious majority, and reopen schools and universities. Vietnam was becoming a public relations nightmare for President Kennedy, he declared, citing as an example Madame Nhu's offer to furnish matches and fuel for the Buddhist self-immolations and Nhu's public threat to have his father-in-law (a critic) killed. Diem listened in stony-faced silence and then replied that his government would continue to deal firmly with any disorder so that it could successfully prosecute the war against the communists.
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Shortly thereafter, Bill Colby briefed President Kennedy and the NSC on the situation in South Vietnam. A coup attempt seemed inevitable unless Washington intervened, he said, but the outcome was uncertain. Loyalist and insurgent forces were about equal in strength. JFK's team remained as divided as ever, with Robert Kennedy joining McCone in declaring that one coup would just lead to another. Harriman observed that support for the Diem regime in Vietnam was continuing to decline, and that there was no way the present government could deal with the communist insurgency. From Saigon, Lodge cabled that the coming coup would succeed, and that the United States could not delay or discourage it. President Kennedy remained on the fence. The day following, Colby proposed to McCone that Ngo Dinh Nhu be installed in his brother's place. Despite his shortcomings, which included a philosophy with “fascist overtones,” he was a “strong, reasonably well oriented and efficient potential successor.” Colby seemed oblivious to the fact that it was Nhu's crushing of the Buddhists and his wife's shenanigans that had precipitated the decision in Washington in late August to let matters take their course in Saigon. McCone did not even bother to bring his subordinate's suggestion before the president and the NSC. At JFK's direction, Rusk instructed Lodge not to provide direct aid to the coup plotters, but observed that “once a coup under responsible leadership has begun . . . it is in the interest of the U.S. Government that it should succeed.”
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Nhu was aware of the plotting against the regime, although confusion among the generals made the waters murky even to the best informed. What Nhu did not know was that Ton That Dinh, a devout Catholic and heretofore staunch Diem loyalist, was among the conspirators. Desperate, Nhu came up with an outlandish scheme, code-named Bravo, to save the House of Ngo. Loyalist troops under Colonel Tung would stage a fake
coup, vandalizing the capital. In the ensuing chaos, assassination teams organized by Tung would do away with the principal coup plotters—Generals Duong Van “Big” Minh, Tran Van Don, and Le Van Kim—and possibly key Americans, such as Conein and even Lodge. The brothers would then flee to Vung Tau on the coast some 60 miles from Saigon. Finally, another group of loyalist officers organized by Tung would “arrest” the fake coup leaders and call for a restoration of the Diem government. Ton That Dinh was placed in charge of the fake coup. He persuaded Tung to disperse his Special Forces to the provinces and summoned the ARVN's 7th Division to the capital.
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The morning of November 1, Lodge escorted Admiral Harry Felt to the palace for a courtesy call. At the end of the meeting, Diem asked Lodge, who was due to depart for a long-scheduled trip to Washington the next day, to stay behind for a few minutes. Alluding to rumors of a coup, the president asked Lodge to inform JFK that “I am a good and a frank ally, that I would rather be frank and settle questions now than talk about them after we have lost everything.” Ask Mr. Colby about brother Nhu, he said. It was Colby who had suggested that brother Nhu climb down out of his ivory tower and get out among the people. He was prepared to make changes in his government, Diem said, but it was a question of timing. He was not interested in power but only solutions. Lodge assured the president that rumors of assassination plots directed against him (Lodge) had not in any way “affected my feeling of admiration and personal friendship for him [Diem] or for Vietnam.” Shortly before his meeting with Diem, Lodge had told Conein that if the coup did not go off soon, he would see that the CIA operative would never again work for the US government.
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While the ambassador was at the palace, the station reported to Langley that the city was quieter—“more normal”—than at any time since the first Buddhist demonstration. Then at 13:30 hours, it sent a flash cable reporting “red neckerchief troops pouring into Saigon from direction Bien Hoa, presumably marines.” With the Special Forces out of the capital, Diem and Nhu had only the Palace Guard to fight for them. As Conein looked on, General Ton That Dinh called Nhu, cursing and threatening him. Initially, the counselor to the president believed this was all part of the fake coup, but then he realized the game was up. Meanwhile, the coup leaders had summoned Colonel Tung to military headquarters on a pretext. Shortly after his arrival, he was taken outside and shot. Colby would view the
killing as barbaric and unnecessary, describing Tung, Nhu's instrument in the brutal August pagoda raids, as “a very mild, straightforward, decent guy.” With the palace under full assault, Diem called Lodge to inquire about the American position. Lodge told him that the embassy was not well enough informed to have an opinion. Exasperated, Diem responded, “You must have some general ideas. After all, I am a Chief of State. I have tried to do my duty.” No one could question that, Lodge said, and then noted that the rebels had offered the brothers safe conduct out of the country. “I am trying to reestablish order,” Diem exclaimed, and hung up.
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