Authors: Oliver Stone,L. Fletcher Prouty
These are incredible men, these defiers of presidents. One might say that they do not need them. Ambassador George V. Allen, after a state dinner with John Foster Dulles, said, “Dulles spoke as if he had his own line to God and was getting his instructions from a very high source.”
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Allen Dulles was also a lawyer and a partner with Sullivan & Cromwell. The brothers were in touch with the power elite, and a mere President influenced them not at all. So many qualified people who have worked “close to the seat of power”—men like Winston Churchill, R. Buckminster Fuller, Prof. Joseph Needham and Ambassador Allen—confirm that these so-called leaders get their instructions from a very high source. These “leaders” are all fine actors, and certainly not true rulers, as we witness in the example of this National Security Council meeting of January 1954. This is true not only in the world of politics but is equally true of banking, industry, academia, and religion.
This explains why so many of the visible activists in high places are lawyers. In that profession they are trained to work under the direction of their clients. They have been educated for such service in the higher universities, many of them with courses designed for just such purposes. And they are further trained in the major international law firms that make a business of providing many of their skilled “partners” for top-level government service, for directorships on bank boards, and for major industrial positions.
In the case of Vietnam, the course followed by the U.S. government was established by these two international Wall Street lawyers, John Foster Dulles and Allen Welch Dulles, among other, more invisible powers. A review of the record of the early days of the war in Vietnam will reveal how they did it.
On January 14, 1954, only six days after the President’s “vehement” statement against the entry of U.S. armed forces in Indochina, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said: “Despite everything that we do, there remained a possibility that the French position in Indochina would collapse. If this happened and the French were thrown out, it would, of course, become the responsibility of the victorious Vietminh to set up a government and maintain order in Vietnam.”
The secretary added:
[I do] not believe that in this contingency this country [the United States] would simply say, “Too bad; we’re licked and that’s the end of it.”
If we could carry on effective guerrilla operations against this new Vietminh government, we should be able to make as much trouble for this government [the Vietminh-formed Democratic Republic of Vietnam] as they had made for our side and against the legitimate governments of the Associated States
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in recent years. Moreover, the costs would be relatively low. Accordingly, an opportunity will be open to us in Southeast Asia even if the French are finally defeated by the Communists. We can raise hell and the Communists will find it just as expensive to resist as we are now finding it.
What John Foster Dulles said exposed the method used to circumvent the views of the President about the introduction of U.S. forces: first, by ignoring him completely, and, second, by changing the words from “making war” to “raising hell” with “guerrilla operations.” Note also that Dulles assumed, as we all did, that there would be some government in existence in the south that could take care of itself and its people.
This is how American intervention and direct involvement in the Vietnam War began—in opposition to the words of the President and in compliance with the longer-range Grand Strategy of the power elite. After all, we had been arming all sides in Indochina since 1945. According to a record of the January 14, 1954, National Security Council meeting, it was: “b. Agreed that the Director of Central Intelligence [Allen Dulles], in collaboration with other appropriate departments and agencies should develop plans, as suggested by the Secretary of State [John Foster Dulles], for certain contingencies in Indochina.”
Two weeks later, on January 29, the President’s Special Committee on Indochina
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met to discuss these plans developed by the director of central intelligence. During this meeting, it was agreed that he could add “an unconventional-warfare officer, specifically Colonel Lansdale,” to the group of five liaison officers that had been accepted by the French commander, General Henri Navarre.
In this manner, the CIA created the Saigon Military Mission and sent it from Manila to Indochina. This “military mission,” undoubtedly the most important single “war-making” American organization established in Indochina between 1945 and 1975, was seldom in Saigon. It was not a military mission in the conventional sense, as the secretary of state had said. It was a CIA organization with a clandestine mission designed to “raise hell” with “guerrilla operations” everywhere in Indochina, a skilled terrorist organization capable of carrying out its sinister role in accordance with the Grand Strategy of those Cold War years.
By 1954, the French had created a fragile, basically fictitious government of the State of Vietnam under Emperor Bao Dai. It was said that none of the members of his Chamber of Deputies could have mustered twenty-five votes from their “constituencies.” This made the issue quite clear to the Vietnamese, even if it could be concealed from the rest of the world. Through seven years of war, the Vietnamese people’s choice was between the French and Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
The Vietnamese government that Eisenhower believed ought to be fighting the Vietminh on its own behalf did not exist in 1954. Thus, the choice of the predominant number of these Indochinese was overwhelmingly Ho Chi Minh. They felt no loyalty to Bao Dai, who lived in Paris, and they hated the French.
This was the situation when the CIA created the Saigon Military Mission on January 29, 1954. At this meeting, Allen Dulles was accompanied by his deputy, Gen. Charles P. Cabell; George Aurell, formerly chief of station in Manila; and Edward G. Lansdale. Lansdale, who had been in the Philippines since 1950, working as an agent of the CIA with Ramon Magsaysay and others to defeat President Quirino, had been ordered by the CIA to return to Washington for this series of meetings on Vietnam, preparatory to returning to Saigon to head the newly formed Saigon Military Mission. In his own book
In the Midst of Wars,
Lansdale says:
Dulles turned to me and said that it had been decided that I was to go to Vietnam to help the Vietnamese, much as I had helped the Filipinos. Defense officials added their confirmation of this decision.
I was to assist the Vietnamese in counterguerrilla training and to advise as necessary on governmental measures for resistance to Communist actions.
Lansdale would continue in Vietnam, as he had in the Philippines, to exploit the cover of an air force officer and to be assigned to the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) for “cover assignment” purposes. He was always an agent of the CIA, and his actual bosses were always with the CIA.
A statement made by Lansdale is quite relevant:
I had been told that I was to help the Vietnamese help themselves. As far as I knew, this still was almost impossible for an American to do. The French ran Vietnam as a colony, with a minimum of Vietnamese self-rule. Chief of State Bao Dai was in France.
It was true that France had said that Vietnam was independent, but the French issued and controlled Vietnam’s currency, ran the national bank, customs, foreign affairs, armed forces, and police, and had a host of French officials placed throughout the administrative system. The French high commissioner for Vietnam was the real authority. Was the shock of Dien Bien Phu and the conference at Geneva causing a change of status? I simply didn’t know.
I had met Ed Lansdale and many of his Filipino associates in Manila in 1953–54, and we were both assigned to the Office of Special Operations in the Pentagon during the late fifties and early sixties. I have heard him speak of his serious problems with the French in Saigon, which were so severe that he thought he might be killed by them. He had similar problems with certain Vietnamese. However, his Saigon Military Mission and its tough, experienced team managed to “raise hell,” weather the storm, and present the U.S. government with a full-fledged, ready-made war by the spring of 1965.
The Saigon Military Mission entered Vietnam clandestinely to assist the Vietnamese, rather than the French. This was their “official” objective—on paper. Again it might be asked, Who did they mean by the “Vietnamese”? They had the same problem Eisenhower did. What Vietnamese government was there to help? As members of that team understood their orders, they were to wage paramilitary operations against the enemy and to carry out psychological warfare. They might not have known who their friends were, but they knew who their enemy was—the Vietminh. They also knew their job. They did not waste much time on “advisory” work or on PsyWar “Fun and Games.” They were in Vietnam for bigger game. They were a band of superterrorists.
It must be kept in mind that the SMM was a CIA activity and that when its members said they were going to promote PsyWar and propaganda they had a different concept of these things than did the military. They saw their role as promoting sabotage, subversion, labor strikes, armed uprisings, and guerrilla warfare.
Their propaganda activity included the use of radio and newspapers, leaflets delivered by the millions from converted USAF B-29 bombers, posters, slogans, exhibits, fairs, motion pictures, educational and cultural exchanges, technical exchanges, specialized advertising, and help for the people in disaster areas. They attempted to do everything possible to exploit the nationalistic feelings of the people in an attempt to unite this new country.
Another characteristic of their work was the use of paramilitary organizations. Such units are no more than a private army whose members accept some measure of discipline, have a military-type organization, and carry light weapons.
The most interesting aspect of the SMM was that its leaders were firm believers in the
Little Red Book
teachings of Mao Tse-tung and spread the word accordingly. That book contained the doctrine of guerrilla warfare as practiced during the Cold War. Years later, after Lansdale had come home from Vietnam, he made many speeches at the various war colleges. Almost without exception he enumerated the “three great disciplinary measures” and the “eight noteworthy points” of Mao Tse-tung’s great Chinese Eighth Route Army.
I was the pilot of U.S. Air Force heavy transport aircraft on many flights from Tokyo to Saigon via the Philippines from 1952 to 1954. When Lansdale’s team members were on board the plane during some of those five-hour flights between Manila and Saigon, we discussed the Magsaysay campaign being waged by the CIA against Quirino and the plans that were being made for a new government in Vietnam—a new government to be supported by the United States, after the French departure.
It may be noted here that although National Security Council records and Department of State records show that the Saigon Military Mission did not begin until January 1954, there were other CIA activities in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (such as the White Cloud teams) long before 1954, and some members of the SMM had participated in these earlier activities as far back as 1945. All of this was formally endorsed by the agreement to create the SMM in 1954. Although there was no real South Vietnamese government for the SMM to support during the early months of 1954, there was going to be one; the Dulles brothers would see to that.
The Saigon Military Mission was sent to Vietnam to preside over the dissolution of French colonial power and over the bursting of the Bao Dai “State of Vietnam” bubble. The Dulles brothers knew, by January 1954 if not long before that, that they would be creating a new Vietnamese government that would be neither French nor Vietminh and that this new government would then become the base for continuing the decade-old war in Indochina. That was their primary objective.
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The Dulles brothers were in a position to make sure that both the French and the Bao Dai interests were defeated. Dien Bien Phu fell on May 8, 1954. The international agreements that were signed in Geneva, Switzerland, on July 21, 1954, with both the United States and South Vietnam abstaining, restricted, on paper, all official American representation in Vietnam to those who were there then, and only for the first 300 days after the agreement was signed.
Thereafter, the introduction of arms, equipment, and personnel was prohibited, except for normal rotation of military personnel and for the replacement of items in kind. The agreement prohibited the establishment of any new military bases. This meant that the SMM had to be in place by mid-May 1955. In some respects the SMM disregarded this agreement. I flew military equipment, such as ground radars made in Italy, into Saigon during this period, when we had to paint out the original addresses and retype the manifests while the plane was in the air. We had to fly through India, and India was a member of the International Inspection Team in Saigon. At the time of the Geneva accords, the United States had delivered aid to Indochina at an original cost of $2.6 billion. (As a military planning factor, “life-of-type” follow-on support generally multiplies the original cost by a factor of ten.)
Edward G. Lansdale, chief of the SMM, arrived in Saigon from Washington via Manila on June 1, 1954, less than one month after the defeat of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu. All over Vietnam, the Vietminh and other nationalist villagers were quickly consolidated in the north and other areas where they predominated. The defeated French units were disarmed, and their equipment and supplies were taken over by the Vietminh, thus increasing the Vietminh arsenal enormously. What they could not take away they destroyed. Every night, during my flights to Saigon, I could hear explosions in and around Saigon and other stronghold areas.