Embers of War (102 page)

EDWARD LANSDALE AND NGO DINH DIEM IN AN UNDATED PHOTO, TAKEN AT THE PRESIDENTIAL PALACE IN SAIGON.
(photo credit 25.3)

“I had only to lift my telephone, and the coup d’état would have been over,” Hinh said soon after. “Nothing could have opposed the army. But the Americans let me know that if that happened, dollar help would have been cut off. That would not matter to the military; if necessary, we soldiers could go barefoot and eat rice. But the country cannot survive without American help. We would only have played into the Viets’ hands with a revolt.”
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Lansdale also helped facilitate the mass movement of refugees from north to south—though almost certainly his role has been exaggerated in some accounts. Beginning in a serious way in the summer of 1954, waves of refugees, most of them Catholic, went to the south under the provisions of the Geneva Accords permitting civilian regroupment. (Article 14d: “Any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party who wish to go and live in the zone assigned to the other party shall be permitted and helped to do so.”) As hundreds of thousands of refugees descended upon Haiphong in August and awaited evacuation, the French Air Force and Navy, realizing they were unprepared for the onslaught, asked Washington for assistance. The Pentagon ordered the U.S. Navy to mobilize a task force to assist in the evacuation, and in short order, ships were steaming from Subic Bay in the Philippines, bound for Haiphong.

All told, French and U.S. ships would make some five hundred trips in three hundred days, ferrying almost nine hundred thousand people southward, in perhaps the largest civilian evacuation—and largest sea migration—in history to that point. Entire northern Catholic communities abandoned most of their worldly possessions and set off en masse, their priests in the lead, in what the U.S. Navy dubbed Operation Passage to Freedom. The result was a major reordering of the religious balance of Vietnam. Before the exodus, most Vietnamese Catholics lived north of the seventeenth parallel; afterward the majority lived south of it. By 1956, the diocese of Saigon had more Catholics than Paris or Rome. By then, more than a million of Vietnam’s Catholics lived in the south, 55 percent of them refugees from the north.
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The United States and the State of Vietnam reaped significant propaganda benefits from the mass exodus to the south in 1954–55. It seemed a perfect example of refugees “voting with their feet,” a damning indictment of the Viet Minh regime, and it was especially notable for the fact that comparatively few people went in the other direction, from south to north. The evacuation received wide play in the American press, with readers learning that the travelers, once they completed the journey, were given “welcome kits” of soap, towel, and toothpaste, and tins of milk labeled “From the people of America to the people of Viet Nam—a gift.” Left out of the accounts was that the exodus was not altogether spontaneous. Though many Catholics needed no incentive to leave the north, Lansdale and his CIA team initiated a campaign to convince the skeptics. In Catholic areas in the north, they broadcast the messages that “Christ has gone to the south” and “The Virgin Mary has departed the north” in order to be with Diem, a devout Catholic. They promised “five acres and a water buffalo” to every relocated refugee. In another gambit, Lansdale arranged for leaflets to be dropped over the same areas showing a map of North Vietnam with a series of concentric circles emanating from Hanoi. The none-too-subtle suggestion: that Hanoi was a likely target for a U.S. atomic bomb.
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Even some Americans on the scene questioned the claims. “At one point I recall arguing with Lansdale over a propaganda story about village children whose eardrums had been ruptured by the insertion of chopsticks during a Viet Minh torture session,” Howard Simpson of the U.S. Information Service, who was in Saigon as a kind of unofficial press adviser to Diem in the period, later wrote. “There was something about the account that didn’t ring true. I had seen and heard enough of torture by both sides during my time in the field. Chopsticks had never featured as a preferred instrument.… Lansdale only flashed his all-knowing smile and changed the subject. The chopstick story soon spread through Haiphong and was picked up by the Saigon press and some Western correspondents. The veteran psywarrior obviously knew his business.”
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VI

NOVEMBER 1954 WITNESSED A CHANGING OF THE GUARD IN SAIGON
, one with unexpected results. U.S. ambassador Heath packed his bags, to be replaced by special presidential envoy General J. Lawton “Lightning Joe” Collins. The unflappable Heath had worked quite effectively with the French for three years, keeping them in the fight and reasonably content. That very success made him a figure of suspicion among some in the State Department and the Pentagon, who thought him too pro-Paris, too tolerant of French intrigues against Diem—and too ambivalent in his own assessment of the premier’s leadership. That Heath during his tenure had also been adept at reassuring nationalists in Saigon that Washington supported their desire for a free and independent Vietnam was small comfort to these critics. French foot-dragging “must be ruthlessly overcome,” Admiral Felix Stump, commander of the Pacific Fleet, declared in calling for Eisenhower to appoint a single individual with overall authority to oversee the entire U.S. effort in Vietnam.
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Dulles liked the suggestion, as did Eisenhower. They tapped Collins, a former chief of staff of the army during the Korean War; as one of Eisenhower’s corps commanders in Europe in World War II, he had earned a reputation for decisive leadership and toughness. In early November, Collins, who it will be recalled had visited Vietnam in 1951, found himself in Saigon as the president’s special representative with wide authority and the rank of ambassador.
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His arrival initially heightened French nervousness. General Paul Ely, the French high commissioner, believed Washington was replacing Heath because “because his realism caused him to oppose the State Department in defending positions which were very close to ours.” Ely, who had worked with Collins when both men were assigned to the NATO Standing Group and who liked him personally, predicted that Collins’s mission would generate a very unfavorable reaction in Paris, where “it would be taken as meaning that the U.S. was going to take over in Indochina.” He did not come to the airport to greet the American. Sure enough, in his first press conference Collins proclaimed that he was in South Vietnam “to give every possible aid to the government of Ngo Dinh Diem and to his government only.”
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Before long, however, Lightning Joe showed a different side of his personality: his capacity for independent thought. With Ely he hammered out a joint Franco-American command to train the Vietnamese National Army, and though the early operation of this Training Relations Instruction Mission (TRIM) was far from smooth, it did function, thanks in good part to the effective Collins-Ely partnership. Ely made no secret of his low opinion of Diem, informing Collins that the premier was “a losing game.” Collins, in short order, decided the Frenchman had a point. “Diem is a small, shy, diffident man with almost no personal magnetism,” he noted in a cable to Dulles a few days after arrival. “I am by no means certain he has [the] inherent capacity to manage [the] country during this critical period.” A few weeks after that, Collins went further. “Diem still represents our chief problem,” he reported to Washington, and his assessment of Diem’s shortcomings “has worsened rather than improved.” The “time may be approaching rapidly” when thought should be given to “possible alternatives.” How soon? Collins set January 1 as the deadline; if Diem had not shown an ability to govern effectively by then, a replacement should be sought.
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It was hardly the message Washington expected or wanted. The day after this top-secret cable arrived, Dulles sent three subordinates, including the zealously anti-Communist assistant secretary for the Far East, Walter Robertson, to Mike Mansfield’s office, copy in hand, to solicit his reaction. The senator responded as expected: He backed Diem fully and warned against giving up on him “for some unknown and untried combination.” Collins’s proposal for a short deadline was foolish, Mansfield added, for no leader could be expected to show significant results in so brief a period of time. His statements were passed on to Dulles for use within the administration and with the press, and were also sent to Collins in Saigon. Later in December, when Collins once again complained about Diem and even gingerly suggested that the United States consider cutting her losses and withdrawing from Vietnam, Robertson again hustled to Mansfield’s office for a reply. Mansfield repeated his defense of Diem, and Robertson made sure Dulles got the word.
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Collins also got pushback from Lansdale, who pressed his argument that Diem should be supported and that South Vietnam was too important to abandon. “I feel we have too much to lose to consider losing or withdrawing,” he told Collins on January 3. “We have no other choice but to win here or face an increasingly grim future, a heritage which none of us wants to pass along to our offspring.”
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Collins wavered. In January, the tenor of his telegrams changed, as the Saigon government showed signs of life. Land reform legislation was drafted, and a provisional assembly was organized to write a constitution. Diem even gave signs—faint and tentative, but signs nonetheless—that he understood the need for social and political reform and would act accordingly. Collins told Washington he now saw hope for Diem, saw signs of progress in the government’s performance, and he affirmed in stark terms the importance of the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam. Mistrust of French intentions now crept into his analysis, as he warned Dulles that France sought a new government that would be submissive to her, most likely with Bao Dai as its leader. Keeping the French in line would thus be essential. “If Diem has firm support and guidance and active French cooperation, or at least acquiescence, his government has a reasonable prospect of success,” the ambassador concluded in late January. “I cannot guarantee that Vietnam will remain free, even with our aid. But I know that without our aid Vietnam will surely be lost to Communism.”
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It further pleased Collins that Diem’s regime enjoyed economic independence from the French Union’s franc zone as of January 1, and that South Vietnam now became the direct beneficiary of U.S. economic aid. The United States channeled much of that money through her Commercial Import Program (CIP), which was modeled on the Marshall Plan. Washington gave dollars to the Saigon government, which then sold them to South Vietnamese importers. These businessmen purchased the dollars with piasters at one-half the official exchange rate; they then used these cut-rate dollars to buy American goods. South Vietnamese officials also collected tariffs on these U.S.-subsidized imports. It was a brilliant scheme, at least on paper. Not the least of its benefits was that the government could use the piasters it collected from the selling of the dollars to pay the cost of the army, police, and civil service.
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It all put Secretary of State Dulles in a buoyant mood when he made his first visit to South Vietnam in February. Dulles assured Diem privately that the Eisenhower administration had “a great stake” in him, and he announced at a press conference, “Today I do not know of any responsible quarter which has any doubts about backing Diem as the head of this government.” Never mind the continuous French efforts to have Diem replaced, and never mind Collins’s previously articulated skepticism. The assembled journalists got the unambiguous message that the Diem experiment was a success, and Collins, standing by the secretary as he spoke, gave no indication that he disagreed.
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VII

DIEM SAVORED THE MOMENT, BUT NOT FOR LONG. HIS TROUBLES
with the sects were about to worsen. The Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao had both raised armed forces several years before, when the French were anxiously seeking any local military assistance they could get against the Viet Minh. The French had supplied weapons and money in exchange for a commitment by both sects to defend their respective areas. In the vacuum of power following the Geneva Accords, however, Cao Dai and Hoa Hao leaders had seized the opportunity to expand their control, levying taxes and raising troops in their sectors.
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When the French in February 1955 stopped their payments, sect leaders demanded that their armies be integrated intact into the VNA and stationed in their home territories, and moreover that the government continue the French subsidies. Diem refused. With Lansdale’s help, he instead used American funds to cajole factions of the sect forces to his side—as much as $3 million in one case. The total amounts distributed may have reached $12 million or more, but Lansdale denied that the payments constituted bribery. The money, he remarked, was merely “back pay.” Thus the Cao Dai’s Trinh Minh Thé, whom American analysts had viewed as a potential Third Force leader since he defected with his men from the French Union army in 1951, purportedly received payment after Lansdale convinced him to reintegrate his army with Diem’s military, the idea being that Thé would share the money with his men.
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But the biggest obstacle to Diem’s consolidation of power in the south came from the Binh Xuyen gang—forty thousand strong, well armed, and swollen with profits from gambling, extortion, and prostitution. Diem’s attempts to control security forces and police in Saigon had met with blatant opposition from Binh Xuyen leader Bay Vien, a Bao Dai protégé, and the premier moved to step up the pressure. In mid-January, he refused to renew the gambling license of Bay Vien’s Grande Monde casino in Cholon, whereupon Bay Vien announced he would join with the religious sects in a “united front” against Diem’s “dictatorial” regime. Green-bereted Binh Xuyen troops set up arbitrary checkpoints and road barriers in the Saigon-Cholon area and installed sandbag and barbed-wire defenses around their headquarters on the rue Catinat, within rifle range of Diem’s palace. In late March, the sects issued an ultimatum demanding that Diem reconstitute his government to include a cabinet of “National Union,” and they gave him five days to comply.
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