Deadly Deceits (22 page)

During the 1930s the ICP was divided by a series of internal battles about the proper way to fight the French, and at the same time was decimated by the French police.

In September 1939, World War II broke out in Europe and in September 1940 Japanese troops moved into Vietnam. During World War II the Japanese asserted control over the ports and airfields of Vietnam but allowed the French to continue to administer the local government. This cooperation ceased a few months before the end of World War II when the Japanese took control of all of Vietnam.

World War II was decisive for Ho's forces, for in 1941 he returned from China—where he had observed Mao's program of organizing the peasantry to overthrow Chiang—and formed the Viet Minh coalition to fight the Japanese and the French. A major element of Ho's program was reconfiscation of the land of the French and their Vietnamese puppets and distribution of that land to the peasantry.
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Through his anti-imperialism and land-reform programs, Ho built the Viet Minh into
a committed, broad-based political organization, making him the only Vietnamese leader with a dedicated national following.

During World War II the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, recognized the strength of the Viet Minh and depended on it for intelligence and help in recovering downed pilots.
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The OSS and the Viet Minh worked in close cooperation and the OSS provided 5,000 weapons, along with ammunition and training, to convert Ho's guerrillas into an organized army.
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When the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, the Viet Minh marched into Hanoi and dozens of other cities in Vietnam and proclaimed the birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). For a few weeks in September 1945, Vietnam was for the first time in recent history free of foreign domination. North and South were united under Ho.

Through a series of maneuvers, the French sought to re-colonize Vietnam and to destroy Ho's government. They installed a puppet, Bao Dai, and militarily tried to impose their will over the Vietnamese.
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At first the United States was reluctant to accept this blatant French move, but the “loss” of China, the Korean War, and the deteriorating French position caused a reassessment. In 1950 the U.S. began providing direct military aid to French troops fighting in Vietnam as the struggle there was deemed an integral part of containing communism. By 1954 the U.S. was financing 78 percent of the war.
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The 1954 Geneva Conference to negotiate an end to the war concluded in July, only a few months after the French had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu. The accords reached at Geneva stated that there would be a cease-fire and a temporary military partition of Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Each side was given 300 days to complete the evacuation. The North was turned over to the Communists and the South to the French-backed Bao Dai. The final declaration said that North and South Vietnam were to be reunited on the basis of free elections to be held throughout the country on July 26,1956—elections that then Premier Ngo Dinh Diem and his American advisers later refused to hold.

U.S. policymakers decided the French had lost their will to fight in Vietnam and began to plan to assume the French role in that country. This approach was formalized on
August 20, 1954 in National Security Council memorandum NSC 5429/2, which said the U.S. must “disassociate France from levers of command, integrate land reform with refugee resettlement.… Give aid directly to the Vietnamese—not through France.… Diem must broaden the governmental base, elect an assembly, draft a constitution and legally dethrone Bao Dai.”
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Once this decision was made, overnight the CIA's intelligence about the situation in Vietnam switched. The Agency now portrayed Diem as the miracle worker who was saving Vietnam. To make the illusion a reality, the CIA undertook a series of operations that helped turn South Vietnam into a vast police state. The purpose of these operations was to force the native South Vietnamese to accept the Catholic mandarin Diem, who had been selected by U.S. policymakers to provide an alternative to communism in Vietnam.
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It was a strange choice. From 1950 to 1953, while Ho's forces were earning the loyalty of their people by fighting the French, Diem, a short, fussy bachelor, was living in the U.S. in Maryknoll seminaries in New Jersey and New York.

Diem arrived in Saigon in mid-1954 and was greeted by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the CIA's man in South Vietnam and the head of the Agency's Saigon Military Mission (SMM). Diem was opposed by virtually all elements of South Vietnamese society—Bao Dai's followers, the pro-French religious sects, the Buddhists, the remnant nationalist organizations, and, of course, the followers of Ho Chi Minh. He had no troops, no police, no government, and no means of enforcing his rule. What he did have was the complete support of Colonel Lansdale and all the money, manpower, weapons, training, propaganda, and political savvy in the CIA's covert-action war chest.

To create Diem's government, Lansdale's men, operating in teams in North Vietnam, stimulated North Vietnamese Catholics and the Catholic armies deserted by the French to flee south. SMM teams promised Catholic Vietnamese assistance and new opportunities if they would emigrate. To help them make up their minds, the teams circulated leaflets falsely attributed to the Viet Minh telling what was expected of citizens under the new government. The day following distribution of the leaflets, refugee registration tripled. The teams
spread horror stories of Chinese Communist regiments raping Vietnamese girls and taking reprisals against villages. This confirmed fears of Chinese occupation under the Viet Minh. The teams distributed other pamphlets showing the circumference of destruction around Hanoi and other North Vietnamese cities should the United States decide to use atomic weapons. To those it induced to flee over the 300-day period the CIA provided free transportation on its airline, Civil Air Transport, and on ships of the U.S. Navy. Nearly a million North Vietnamese were scared and lured into moving to the South.

Lieutenant Tom Dooley, who operated with the U.S. Navy out of Haiphong, also helped to stimulate the flow of refugees to the South. At one point he organized a gathering of 35,000 Catholics to demand evacuation. A medical doctor, Dooley was a supreme propagandist whose message seemed aimed largely at the U.S. audience. He wrote three bestselling books, and numerous newspaper and magazine articles were written about him. Dr. Dooley's concocted tales of the Viet Minh disemboweling 1,000 pregnant women, beating a naked priest on the testicles with a bamboo club, and jamming chopsticks in the ears of children to keep them from hearing the word of God, aroused American citizens to anger and action.
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Dr. Dooley's reputation remained unsullied until 1979, when his ties to the CIA were uncovered during a Roman Catholic sainthood investigation.
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The Agency's operation worked. It not only convinced the North Vietnamese Catholics to flee to the South, thereby providing Diem with a source of reliable political and military cadres, but it also duped the American people into believing that the flight of the refugees was a condemnation of the Viet Minh by the majority of Vietnamese.

Now the scene had been set and the forces defined. The picture drawn to justify U.S. involvement was that the Communist North was invading the Free World South. The CIA was ordered to sustain that illusion through propaganda and, through covert operations, to make the illusion a reality. Its intelligence, with an occasional minor exception, was only a convenient vehicle to sell the lie to the U.S. bureaucracy and people. Unfortunately, nearly everyone, including later policymakers, was deceived by this big lie. While the plan was never detailed in a single available document, an examination of the
Pentagon Papers
, plus other related information, demands this conclusion.

A raft of Americans now descended upon Diem. The U.S. Army began training and arming his army. The CIA concentrated on building a government and a police for the new ruler.

Colonel Lansdale formed the Freedom Company of the Philippines to send Filipinos to Vietnam under the guise of a private philanthropic organization to train Diem's palace guard, to organize the Vietnamese Veterans Legion, to help write the new constitution, to look for promising agent material to encadre the planned programs, and to assist the arriving North Vietnamese.
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Saigon and environs in the summer of 1954 were ruled by two pro-French religious-military sects (the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao) and a bandit secular group (the Binh Xuyen). The U.S. stopped funding the French and funneled all its aid directly through Diem. The sect leaders were subverted by bribes, and when that didn't work, by killings. The Binh Xuyen did put up a show of force but were quickly defeated in a battle with Diem's units, which seized control of the capital.

Through the CIA, newspapers in the U.S. learned of Diem's victory, and stories about the miracle of Diem circulated around the globe. The CIA even wrote a Special National Intelligence Estimate that completely lied about what happened and concluded, “His [Diem's] success [was] achieved largely on his own initiative and with his own resources.”
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Bao Dai was quickly removed from the scene by a rigged election that Diem won with 98 percent of the vote.

So, within little more than a year of Diem's return to Saigon, the CIA had completed the imposition of a Catholic premier and the importation of a Catholic encadred army and police to rule a nation that was primarily Buddhist. In 1956 the U.S. government and Diem tightened the new premier's control by calling off the elections for the reunification of North and South Vietnam that had been agreed upon in the Geneva Accords. They did this because they knew that if the elections had taken place, Ho Chi Minh would have won and the country would have been reunited under Communist rule. Even President Eisenhower admitted, “I have never talked … with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that … 80 percent of the population would have voted
for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.”
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Having thus established Diem's military control over Saigon, the CIA then went about imposing Diem's rule over rural South Vietnamese. In this process the Agency used people imported from the North to encadre its programs. For example, the Village Self-Defense Corps, a Colonel Lansdale concept, armed North Vietnamese refugees who had settled on land given them under Diem's land-reform program. The Village Self-Defense Corps years later was renamed the Popular Forces.
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The Agency sponsored another program recruiting young university men from the North to take a census of the population. The recruits soon forgot their census-taking responsibilities and concentrated on gathering intelligence on Communists.

To police the rural areas the CIA, along with teams from Michigan State University, created and trained the 50,000-man Civil Guard whose mission, according to CIA National Intelligence Estimate 63-56, was “to maintain law and order, collect intelligence, and conduct countersubversion operations at the provincial level in areas pacified by the army.”
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The Agency helped Diem develop his political power through creation of the Can Lao Party. Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem's brother, headed the party, which required members at all levels to serve as informants for its intelligence-collection programs. The party, as with all other CIA programs, became obsessed with detecting disloyalty and concentrated its efforts on the police function.

At the core of the intelligence-countersubversion network was Diem's dreaded Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation—a CIA-created security service.
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The rural, predominantly Buddhist South Vietnamese resisted Diem's unfair rule. The continual police operations to seek out disloyalty to Diem caused more and more peasants to join communist organizations for their own survival. Diem reacted to this perceived disloyalty by passing laws making it a crime to speak against the government or to spread rumors. Such crimes were punishable by death. Bernard Fall, in his book
Last Reflections on a War
, observed: “On May 6, 1959, the Diem regime passed Law 10/59, which provided for a system of drumhead courts capable of handing out death
sentences for even trivial offenses. Thus
all
South Vietnamese opposition—whether Communist or not—had to become subversive, and did.… ‘Four persons out of five became suspects and liable to be imprisoned if not executed.'”
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In reaction to Diem's campaign of death against his own people, the southern branch of the Communist Party pressured North Vietnam into supporting their armed revolution. Contrary to the impression generated by Agency propaganda, the war at this stage was not an “invasion from the North” but a local resistance to the despotic Diem regime. Numerous authorities have commented on this subject, and captured Communist documents also reveal this to be true.
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While the Agency was creating all of those “security” programs, it also had to estimate the strength of the communist forces. A captured Communist Party document containing the history of the party stated that its size in the South before Geneva was 60,000 party members (not including members of the mass organizations) with party members in nearly every village except those controlled by the religious sects and ethnic minorities.
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The document said that at that time those in the South had the twofold mission of reorganizing the mass-based organizations and developing military units in absolute secrecy. Beginning with 15,000 dedicated hard-core party members—aided in their organizational efforts by Diem's ruthless oppression—the party began to rebuild itself from the ground up. Over the years it created an interwoven political, civilian, and military structure and honed it into a responsive revolutionary weapon. At the hamlet level nearly every man, woman, and child was recruited into some organization and motivated to fight Diem and his American backers.