JFK (50 page)

Knowing what we do now about the Strategic Hamlets, the million Tonkinese “refugees,” and all the rest of the Saigon Military Mission’s make-war mission from the CIA, it is staggering to realize that by September 2, 1963, Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could write, in a memorandum to the President: “Finally, progress continues with the strategic hamlet program. The latest Government of Vietnam figures indicate that 8,227 of the planned 10,592 hamlets had been completed; 76 percent, or 9,563,370 of the rural population, are now in these hamlets.”

The government provided food in vast quantities, medicine, and small-arms ammunition for the inhabitants of these Strategic Hamlets. Because of the enormous number of starving, homeless people wandering around the country, it was inevitable that they would direct their attacks at these well-supplied hamlets. It got so bad that the new hamlet residents would have to leave the hamlet at night as swarms of bandits pillaged these government stockpiles. They were afraid to live there because they were unable to withstand the ever-present threats from the outside.

Diem’s idea of “pacification,” with its “new democracy” and other benefits, never had a chance. Meanwhile, his brother Nhu began emphasizing government control of the peasantry, at the expense of “pacification” as it was understood in Washington. By this stage, the Kennedy administration had begun to experience serious doubts as to whether the Diem government was “winning the war,” or even capable of doing so. . . on these terms and against that form of “close-in” opposition.

Keep in mind that it is difficult to think back to the Vietnam situation of 1961 and 1962 in terms of what we saw in Vietnam between 1965 and 1975. In 1962, what we now call the Vietnam War was a relatively low level paramilitary activity. All of the combat that in any way involved U.S. armed forces and U.S. personnel was a result of the “advisory” role approved by the President.

To certain military observers, it may have been safe to say that the war was going well, and even safe to predict a time when Diem’s forces—with strong U.S. support—would be victorious. On the other hand, there was so much poor planning, corruption, and alienation of the native, indigenous peasants that it appeared there was no way Diem could win and that a Diem-controlled government would be a serious handicap. By the end of 1962, this latter position prevailed in the White House and even in some areas of the Pentagon and State Department.

As the reader will recall from an earlier chapter, helicopters were introduced by the CIA into Vietnam in December 1960. Between December 1960 and March 1963, more than $2 billion in U.S. assistance had been sent in support of the Diem government. By March 1963 the number of U.S. armed forces “advisers” in Vietnam had been increased to 12,000, and there had been sixty-two American deaths.

Up to March 1963, twenty of the helicopters in action in Vietnam had been destroyed by enemy fire, and sixty helicopters had been destroyed as a result of mechanical trouble; twenty-five of the sixty-two Americans who had died there had been killed in helicopter action.

March 1963 was a turning point in this long warfare in Vietnam. During that month the rules of engagement were officially modified to permit Americans to fire at the enemy if they felt themselves “endangered,” without having to wait to receive enemy fire. As President Kennedy said at that time, “We are engaged in a civil conflict and a battle with communism.”

He had dispatched “advisers” to Vietnam, but he fully recognized the reality of the situation and the position they were in.

Faced with the ambiguities of this situation and the misunderstandings of each other on both sides of the Pacific, by 1963 there arose a feeling within the Kennedy administration that the war should be turned over to Ngo Dinh Diem entirely; or, failing that, that Diem should be replaced. By midsummer 1963, Diem had become more intractable, and the latter view dominated.

During an interview with Walter Cronkite that was broadcast by the CBS television network on the evening of September 2, 1963, President Kennedy said: “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the Communists.”

During the broadcast the President made another comment that most Americans seem to have forgotten: “What, of course, makes Americans somewhat impatient is that after carrying this load for eighteen years, we are glad to get counsel, but we would like a little more assistance, real assistance.”

These are very significant statements. Kennedy was saying, as John Foster Dulles had said in 1953, that Americans have been actively involved in Vietnam since 1945. But things were different then: In 1945, Vietnam had just been freed from Japanese wartime control; in 1945, Ho Chi Minh had declared the independence of a new Democratic Republic of Vietnam; in 1945 there was no government and no country of South Vietnam. The thought that the people of a place called South Vietnam in 1963 had the capability to win a war of independence by themselves was preposterous then as it was when President Eisenhower first proposed the idea in January 1954.

It was in this uncertain atmosphere that the next summer of crises erupted in Vietnam. On May 8, 1963, a mass meeting was held in Hue, the ancient imperial capital of Vietnam, to commemorate Buddha’s birthday. The government saw this demonstration as a challenge, and the Catholic deputy province chief ordered his troops to fire on the mob. Nine people were killed, and many were injured. The following day, in Hue, more than ten thousand people demonstrated in protest of the killings. On May 10 a manifesto was delivered by the Buddhists to the government in Saigon, and on May 30 about 350 Buddhist monks demonstrated in front of the National Assembly in Saigon.

Then, as feelings rose to a fever pitch, Madame Nhu, by now “the Dragon Lady” in the press of the world, exacerbated the problem by announcing that the Buddhists were infiltrated by Communists. Three days later, the press was alerted to be at a main downtown intersection at noon. On June 11, they were horrified to witness the first immolation suicide of a Buddhist monk in protest of Diem’s treatment of his people. Thich Quang Due’s shocking death alarmed the world and electrified Vietnam.

Shortly after midnight on August 21, Ngo Dinh Nhu’s U.S.-trained Special Forces shock troops, along with combat police, invaded Buddhist pagodas in Saigon, Hue, and other coastal cities and arrested hundreds of Buddhist monks. Nhu had decided to eliminate Buddhist opposition in his own way. More than fourteen hundred Buddhists, primarily monks, were arrested, and many of them were injured.

At the same time, President Kennedy had dispatched a new ambassador, the veteran Henry Cabot Lodge, to Saigon. After a brief stop in Tokyo, Lodge arrived in Saigon at 9:30 P.M. on August 22, 1963. This date marked the beginning of the most explosive and ominous ninety days in modern U.S. history.

On November 1, 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu were killed. On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy died. On that date, November 22, 1963, the government of the United States was taken over by a superpower group that wanted an escalation of the warfare in Indochina and a continuing military buildup for generations to come. Within a few days after the assassination, the trends and policies of the Kennedy administration had started to be changed by the new Johnson administration to assure the achievement of these goals. The warfare in Vietnam would go on to become a major military disaster—but at a good price: no less than $500 billion in total expenses.

Why did this happen? What had created all the pressure? Why was John F. Kennedy killed?

Around the time Henry Cabot Lodge arrived in Saigon, certain Vietnamese generals began talking with U.S./CIA contacts to determine what the reaction might be to a military coup d’état against the Diem regime. In particular, they were opposed to Ngo Dinh Diem’s brother, Nhu, who was the head of the Strategic Hamlet program, and his wife.

Nhu had developed and controlled the CIA-trained Vietnamese Special Forces and had handpicked the generals who commanded the military units around Saigon. None of the plotters wished to attack that strength. Ambassador Lodge sent a message to Washington noting the disaffection with the Diem regime, and particularly with the Nhus, but underscoring that the Saigon generals were still strongly with the Diems.

At about this same time, Adm. Harry Felt, the commander in chief of the Pacific Command, called Washington in support of a strong stand against the Nhus, both Diem’s brother and his outspoken wife. Admiral Felt, the senior military commander in the Pacific, was not directly responsible for activities in Vietnam because of the dominant CIA role there. Nevertheless, he followed all developments closely and had his own eyes and ears on the scene.

Shortly after the admiral’s call to Washington, this author was called to Hawaii. After a long introductory discussion with Admiral Felt, I was asked to sit at a table in his office as members of his staff brought stacks of intelligence messages in for analysis.

I worked in his office for the entire week, reviewed hundreds of messages and letters, and had many talks with the admiral and his staff. He was vitally concerned with the intelligence situation. He believed that intelligence gathering in Vietnam was very bad and that commanders, both Vietnamese and American, were being forced to make decisions without sufficient military information and without knowing what the actual situation was. This was particularly true at that time. There was much controversy over the status of the actual military situation throughout the country. There was dissatisfaction over Nhu’s deplorable attacks on the Buddhists. There were rumors of the possibility of the overthrow of Diem and his government, or at least the overthrow of the Nhus.

At the same time, as the U.S. government debated the pros and cons of getting rid of Diem and his brother, there was another unusual development. It became necessary to meet with leaders of the various factions who would support a coup. Such meetings had to be held secretly for the protection of all parties. Certain CIA agents were selected to attend the meetings. One of the men designated for this delicate responsibility was one of the most enigmatic characters of the thirty-year war: Lucien Conein.

Conein was serving in Vietnam in 1963 as a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. He was not actually in the U.S. Army, but was a CIA agent assigned to Indochina under the notional cover of a military officer. Conein, born in France, had been educated in the United States. During World War II his duties with the OSS took him to China, where he worked with U.S. Army major general Gallagher, who operated with the nationalist leader of Indochina, Ho Chi Minh.

At the time of the Japanese surrender, it became necessary to fill the vacuum of leadership in Indochina, particularly in Hanoi, for the purpose of rounding up the Japanese troops still there and providing a rallying point for the people of Indochina, who had been under French colonization and later the Japanese occupation. General Gallagher was sent to Hanoi for this purpose and took with him Ho Chi Minh, Col. Vo Nguyen Giap, and the French-speaking Conein. This was 1945.

In early 1954, when Allen Dulles created the Saigon Military Mission for the purpose of infiltrating CIA agents into Indochina under the cover of the U.S. military, he chose his most experienced Far East agent, Edward G. Lansdale, to be in charge of that unit. Among those on the SMM team was Lucien Conein. While Lansdale spent most of his time that year in Saigon with the fledgling Diem administration, Conein was in Hanoi at the same time working against his old associates, Ho Chi Minh and General Giap.

The scope of the activities of the SMM, and of Lansdale and Conein, had been enlarged to include the mounting of “dirty tricks” against the Vietminh, who were led by Ho Chi Minh, and at times against the French. It has always seemed rather strange that the same man who had arrived in Indochina with Ho Chi Minh should have been the one sent back to Hanoi to employ his clandestine skills against the same Ho Chi Minh. Questions have arisen: Did the SMM really work against the Vietminh, or did it work against the French? And why?

At the same time, of course, the SMM was actively instigating the movement of the more than one million Tonkinese to the south.

All of this took place between 1954 and 1963. This same Lucien Conein, who had been designated as the go-between for the anti-Diem plotters—principally Gen. Duong Van Minh and newly installed U.S. ambassador Lodge—had since 1945 been one of the most important agents of the OSS and later the CIA in the Far East. His orders came from that agency. In 1963, nearly twenty years after arriving in Hanoi, he was being employed to encourage the apparatus being formed to eliminate Diem—the man whom the CIA had installed as leader of the new government of the south. This certainly raises a number of questions.

Why did the U.S. government, in 1945, before the end of World War II, choose to arm and equip Ho Chi Minh? Why did the United States, a few short years later, shift its allegiance from Ho Chi Minh to the French in their losing struggle that ended ignominiously with the battle of Dien Bien Phu? Why, after creating the Diem government in 1954 and after supporting that new government for ten years, did the United States shift again and encourage those Vietnamese who planned to overthrow it? And finally, why, after creating an enormous military force in Indochina, did the U.S. government fail to go ahead and defeat this same Ho Chi Minh when, by all traditional standards of warfare, it possessed the means to do so? The answers to these and related questions remain buried in closed files, along with so much other information of that time period.