by Neil Sheehan
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a memo, said Indochina was “devoid of decisive military objectives.”
May—Dienbienphu fell and the Geneva meetings began.
June—Col. Edward G. Lansdale of the C.I.A. arrived in Saigon to head a team of agents for “paramilitary operations” and “political-psychological warfare” against the North.
July—The Geneva sessions ended in accords “temporarily” dividing Vietnam until reunification through free elections in 1956 and prohibiting foreign military use of Vietnamese territory.
August—A national intelligence estimate termed the chances for a strong regime in the South poor. The National Security Council found the Geneva accords a “disaster” that completed a “major forward stride of Communism,” the study says. A Joint Chiefs’ memo said a “strong, stable civil government” was the “absolutely essential” basis for U.S. military-training aid. But Mr. Dulles felt the military-training program was “one of the most efficient means” of stabilizing a regime. With the President’s approval of the Council’s recommendations for direct economic and military aid to South Vietnam, “American policy toward post-Geneva Vietnam was drawn,” the account says.
October—The Lansdale team undertook the “delayed sabotage” of the Hanoi railroad and other operations.
December—Gen. J. Lawton Collins, the U.S. special representative, urged the removal and replacement of Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader, or the “re-evaluation of our plans” for aid to the area. Mr. Dulles replied that he had “no other choice but to continue our aid to Vietnam and support of Diem.”
1955
April—Mr. Dulles, after meeting with General Collins, cabled the embassy in Saigon to seek an alternative to Diem.
May—Mr. Diem, with the aid of Lansdale, quashed the sect uprising in Saigon. Mr. Dulles canceled his previous cable.
December—Mr. Dulles, in a cable to the embassy in Saigon, said the U.S. should not act to “speed up present process of decay of Geneva accords” but also should not make the “slightest effort to infuse life into them.”
1956
The U.S. sent 350 additional military men to Saigon; the account says this was an “example of the U.S. ignoring” the Geneva accords.
1960
A national intelligence estimate predicted that “discontent with the [Diem] Government will probably continue to rise.”
Chapter 1
The Truman and Eisenhower Years: 1945–1960
—BY FOX BUTTERFIELD
The secret Pentagon study of the Vietnam war discloses that a few days after the Geneva accords of 1954, the Eisenhower Administration’s National Security Council decided that the accords were a “disaster” and approved actions to prevent further Communist expansion in Vietnam.
These National Security Council decisions, the Pentagon account concludes, meant that the United States had “a direct role in the ultimate breakdown of the Geneva settlement.”
That judgment contradicts the repeated assertion of several American administrations that North Vietnam alone was to blame for the undermining of the Geneva accords.
According to the Pentagon writer, the National Security Council, at a meeting on Aug. 8, 1954, just after the Geneva conference, ordered an urgent program of economic and military aid—substituting American advisers for French advisers—to the new South Vietnamese Government of Ngo Dinh Diem.
The objectives set by the Council were “to maintain a friendly non-Communist South Vietnam” and “to prevent a Communist victory through all-Vietnam elections.”
Under the Geneva settlement, Vietnam was to be temporarily divided into two zones pending reunification through elections scheduled for 1956. The introduction of foreign troops or bases and the use of Vietnamese territory for military purposes were forbidden. The United States, which did not join with the nations that endorsed the accords, issued a declaration taking note of the provisions and promising not to disturb them.
But a lengthy report, accompanying the Pentagon study, describes in detail how the Eisenhower Administration sent a team of agents to carry out clandestine warfare against North Vietnam from the minute the Geneva conference closed.
The team, headed by the legendary intelligence operative Col. Edward G. Lansdale, gave a graphic account of the actions just before evacuating Hanoi in October 1954. [See Document #15.]
The report says the team “spent the last days of Hanoi in contaminating the oil supply of the bus company for a gradual wreckage of engines in the buses, in taking actions for delayed sabotage of the railroad (which required teamwork with a C.I.A. special technical team in Japan who performed their part brilliantly), and in writing detailed notes of potential targets for future para-military operations.”
“U. S. adherence to the Geneva agreement,” the authors of the report said, “prevented [the American team] from carrying out the active sabotage it desired to do against the power plant, water facilities, harbor and bridge.”
“The team had a bad moment when contaminating the oil. They had to work quickly at night, in an enclosed storage room. Fumes from the contaminant came close to knocking them out. Dizzy and weak-kneed, they masked their faces with handkerchiefs and completed the job.”
The report is attributed to a hastily assembled group identified as the Saigon Military Mission. Its authors do not explain why they believed sabotage of buses and the railroad was allowed under the Geneva accords if sabotage of the power plant and harbor was forbidden.
The Pentagon study, which was commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara to determine how the United States became involved in the Vietnam war, devotes nine lengthy sections to the nineteen-forties and fifties.
At key points during these years, the Pentagon study says, the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations made far-reaching decisions on Vietnam policy that the public knew little about or misunderstood. And by the time John F. Kennedy became President in 1961, the writers recount, the American Government already felt itself heavily committed to the defense of South Vietnam.
One of the earliest disclosures in the account is that in late 1945 and early 1946, Ho Chi Minh wrote at least eight letters to President Truman and the State Department requesting American help in winning Vietnam’s independence from France. [See Document #1.]
The analyst says he could find no record that the United States ever answered Ho Chi Minh’s letters. Nor has Washington ever revealed that it received the letters.
A key point came in the winter of 1949-50 when the United States made what the account describes as a watershed decision affecting American policy in Vietnam for the next two decades: After the fall of mainland China to the Chinese Communists, the Truman Administration moved to support Emperor Bao Dai and provide military aid to the French against the Communist-led Vietminh.
This decision, which was made amid growing concern in the United States over the expansion of Communism in Eastern Europe and Asia, reversed Washington’s long-standing reluctance to become involved with French colonialism in Indochina.
With this action, the account says, “the course of U. S. policy was set to block further Communist expansion in Asia.” And “the United States thereafter was directly involved in the developing tragedy in Vietnam.”
Another key point came in the spring of 1954, the writer discloses, when the Eisenhower Administration strongly hinted to France twice that it was willing to intervene with American military forces to prevent French defeat in Indochina.
While some information has been made public about these proposals, the Pentagon study says that the public has not understood how seriously the Eisenhower Administration debated intervention.
It adds that during the second episode, which occurred in May and June, 1954, while the Geneva conference was in session, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had aides draft a resolution requesting Congressional authority to commit American troops in Indochina.
The National Security Council was so opposed to France’s negotiating an end
to the war, the analyst relates, that “the President was urged to inform Paris that French acquiescence in a Communist take-over of Indochina would bear on its status as one of the Big Three” and that “U.S. aid to France would automatically cease.”
Then in August, 1954, came the decision that the Pentagon account says determined United States policy toward Vietnam for the rest of the decade: The National Security Council launched its program of economic and military aid to Mr. Diem, then Premier and later President, though its action was not made public for months. [See Document #4.]
The Pentagon account discloses that most of these major decisions from 1950 on were made against the advice of the American intelligence community.
Intelligence analysts in the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department and sometimes the Pentagon repeatedly warned that the French, Emporer Bao Dai and Premier Diem were weak and unpopular and that the Communists were strong.
In early August, 1954, for example, just before the National Security Council decided to commit the United States to propping up Premier Diem, a national intelligence estimate warned:
“Although it is possible that the French and Vietnamese, even with firm support from the U.S. and other powers, may be able to establish a strong regime in South Vietnam, we believe that the chances for this development are poor and moreover, that the situation is more likely to continue to deteriorate progressively over the next year.”
“Given the generally bleak appraisals of Diem’s prospects, they who made U.S. policy could only have done so by assuming a significant measure of risk,” the study says of the Eisenhower commitments.
The Pentagon study does not deal at length with a major question: Why did the policy-makers go ahead despite the intelligence estimates prepared by their most senior intelligence officials?
The most important reason advanced by the Pentagon study is that after the fall of China to the Communists in 1949 and the hardening of American anti-Communist attitudes, “Indochina’s importance to U.S. security interests in the Far East was taken for granted.”
The basic rationale for American involvement—what later came to be called the domino theory—was first clearly enunciated by the National Security Council in February, 1950, when it decided to extend military aid to the French in Indochina.
“It is important to U.S. security interests,” the Council said, “that all practicable measures be taken to prevent further Communist expansion in Southeast Asia. Indochina is a key area and is under immediate threat.
“The neighboring countries of Thailand and Burma could be expected to fall under Communist domination if Indochina is controlled by a Communist government. The balance of Southeast Asia would then be in grave hazard.”
Subsequent Council decision papers throughout the nineteen-fifties repeated this formulation with ever-increasing sweep.
A Council paper approved by President Eisenhower in January, 1954, predicted that the “loss of any single country” in Southeast Asia would ultimately lead to the loss of all Southeast Asia, then India and Japan, and finally “endanger the stability and security of Europe.”
“The domino theory and the assumptions behind it were never questioned,” the Pentagon account says of the Eisenhower years. The result was that the Government’s internal debate usually centered more on matters of military feasibility than on questions of basic national interests.
U.S. Policy in “Disarray”
The Pentagon study, which begins its account of American involvement in Vietnam with World War II, says that American policy from 1940 to 1950 has been a subject of “significant misunderstanding.”
American policy toward Vietnam during these years, the study says, was “Less purposeful” than most people have assumed, and more characterized by “ambivalence and indecision.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the writer relates, never made up his mind whether to support the French desire to reclaim their Indochina colonies from the Japanese at the end of the war.
And at his death, American policy toward Indochina was in “disarray,” the writer says.
He recounts that at first the Truman Administration had no clear-cut reaction to the conflict that broke out in 1945 and 1946 between the French and the Vietminh and eventually led to full-scale war. American policy, he adds, remained “ambivalent.”
In a cablegram still kept secret in State Department files, Secretary of State George C. Marshall described the Government’s quandary to the embassy in Paris:
“We have fully recognized France’s sovereign position and we do not wish to have it appear that we are in any way endeavoring undermine that position.
“At same time we cannot shut our eyes to fact there are two sides this problem and that our reports indicate both a lack of French understanding other side and continued existence dangerously outmoded colonial outlook and method in areas.
“On other hand we do not lose sight fact that Ho Chi Minh has direct Communist connections and it should be obvious that we are not interested in seeing colonial empire administrations supplanted by philosophy and political organization directed from and controlled by Kremlin.
“Frankly we have no solution of problem to suggest.”
On this reasoning, the Truman Government refused French requests for American planes and ships to transport French troops to Indochina and similarly turned down appeals for American arms to help fight the Vietminh.
But the Truman Administration also rebuffed the appeals from Ho Chi Minh. In August and September, 1945, the account relates, while his forces were in control of Hanoi, he sent a request to President Truman through the Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the C.I.A., asking that Vietnam be accorded “the same status as the Philippines” for a period of tutelage pending independence.
From October, 1945, until the following February, the account continues, Ho Chi Minh wrote at least eight letters to President Truman or to the Secretary of State, formally appealing for United States and United Nations intervention against French colonialism.
There is no record, the analyst says, that any of the appeals were answered.
“Nonintervention by the United States on behalf of the Vietnamese was tantamount to acceptance of the French,” the Pentagon account declares.
In 1948 and 1949, as concern about the Soviet Union’s expansion in Eastern Europe grew in the United States, Washington became increasingly anxious about Ho Chi Minh’s Communist affiliations. Nevertheless, the account discloses, a survey by the State Department’s Office of Intelligence and Research in the fall of 1948 concluded that it could not find any hard evidence that Ho Chi Minh actually took his orders from Moscow.
“If there is a Moscow-directed conspiracy in Southeast Asia, Indochina is an anomaly so far,” the study reported in its evaluation section.
With its growing concern about Communism, Washington began to press Paris harder to give more independence to the Indochina states. The American Goverment thus hoped to encourage Vietnamese popular support for Bao Dai as a non-Communist alternative to Ho Chi Minh and his Vietminh.
Yet, the narrative relates, even when in March, 1949, France did agree with Emperor Bao Dai to grant Vietnam independence within the French Union, the Truman Administration continued to withhold its backing, fearful that Bao Dai was still weak and tainted with French colonialism.
In a cablegram to the Paris embassy, the State Department outlined its concern:
“We cannot at this time irretrievably commit the U.S. to support of a native government which by failing to develop appeal among Vietnamese might become virtually a puppet government separated from the people and existing only by the presence of French military forces.”
But when Mao Tse-tung’s armies drove Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek out of China in late 1949, Washington’s ambivalence ended dramatically.
On Dec. 30 President Truman approved a key National Security Council study on Asia, designated N.S.C. 48/2. With it, the Pentagon study says, “The cours
e of U. S. policy was set to block further Communist expansion in Asia.”
“The United States on its own initiative,” the document declared, “should now scrutinize closely the development of threats from Communist aggression, direct or indirect, and be prepared to help within our means to meet such threats by providing political, economic and military assistance and advice where clearly needed to supplement the resistance of other governments in and out of the area which are more directly concerned.”
The Council document concluded that “particular attention should be given to the problem of French Indochina.”
The basic policy decisions having been made, the Pentagon account relates, developments followed swiftly.
When Peking and Moscow recognized Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam in January, 1950, Washington followed by recognizing Bao Dai that Feb. 7.
Nine days later, the French requested military aid for the war in Indochina. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in recommending a favorable reply, wrote in a memorandum to President Truman:
“The choice confronting the U. S. is to support the legal governments in Indochina or to face the extension of Communism over the remainder of the continental area of Southeast Asia and possibly westward.”
On May 8, Washington announced that it would provide economic and military aid to the French in Indochina, beginning with a grant of $10-million.
The first step had been taken. “The U.S. thereafter was directly involved in the developing tragedy in Vietnam,” the account says.
Ultimately, the American military aid program reached $1.1-billion in 1954, paying for 78 per cent of the French war burden.
Brink of Intervention
In the spring of 1954, as the French military position in Indochina deteriorated rapidly and the date for the Geneva conference approached, the Eisenhower Administration twice hinted to France that it was ready to intervene with American forces.
