Pentagon Papers

by Neil Sheehan

  Another team of 21 agents, code-named the Hao group, were recruited in Saigon, smuggled out on a U.S. Navy ship while disguised as coolies, and taken to a “secret site” for training, the report goes on.

  Arms for the Haos were smuggled into Saigon by the United States Air Force, the report says, adding that S.M.M. brought in eight and a half tons of equipment. This included 14 radios, 300 carbines, 50 pistols, 300 pounds of explosives and 100,000 rounds of ammunition.

  The Lansdale team’s report does not tell what kinds of intelligence or sabotage activities the Binh and Hao groups carried out in North Vietnam. But it does recount that one Binh agent was mistakenly picked up by Premier Diem’s troops on his return to South Vietnam.

  “He was interrogated by being handcuffed to a leper, both beaten with the same stick to draw blood, told he would now have leprosy, and both locked up in a tiny cell together,” it says. “S.M.M. was able to have him released.”

  For fiscal year 1955, the report shows, expenses for the Saigon Military Mission ran to $228,000. This did not include salary for the American officers or costs of weapons drawn from American stocks.

  The largest item, $123,980, was listed as payment for operations, including pay and expenses for agents, safe-houses and transportation.

  Lansdale in the Breach

  While Colonel Lansdale’s team carried out its covert operations, the major policy decisions made by the National Security Council in August, 1954, were being put into practice.

  In December, Gen. J. Lawton Collins, who had been chosen by President Eisenhower as his personal representative to Vietnam, signed an agreement with the French providing for the United States to take over all military training duties from them.

  The agreement was put into effect in February, 1955, the account says, and the French, under American pressure, began their unexpected withdrawal from South Vietnam.

  Despite the decision in August, 1954, to back Premier Diem, there was still widespread uneasiness in the American Government over his lack of support and the fragile political situation in Saigon, the Pentagon account goes on.

  General Collins, who had been given the rank of Ambassador, felt that Premier Diem was unequal to the task and urged that he be removed.

  If the United States was unwilling to replace Mr. Diem, General Collins wrote to Washington in December, 1954, then “I recommend re-evaluation of our plans for assisting Southeast Asia.” This is the “least desirable but in all honesty and in view of what I have observed here to date this may be the only sound solution,” he said.

  Still Secretary Dulles remained convinced, as he cabled in reply to General Collins’s message, that “we have no other choice but continue our aid to Vietnam and support of Diem.” And he told Assistant Secretary of State Walter Robertson several days later that the United States must “take the plunge” with Mr. Diem, the narrative adds.

  In the spring of 1955 the crisis in Saigon worsened. The Hoa Hao and Cao Dai armed sects formed a united front with the Binh Xuyen, a group of gangsters who controlled Saigon’s police against Premier Diem, and sporadic fighting broke out in the city. The French told Washington they thought Premier Diem was “hopeless” and “mad.”

  General Collins, now adamant that Mr. Diem must go, flew back to Washington in late April to press his case personally with the Secretary of State.

  On April 27, after a meeting with General Collins, Secretary Dulles reluctantly agreed to the replacing of Premier Diem. He cabled the embassy in Saigon to find an alternative.

  But Colonel Lansdale was working hard to support his friend Mr. Diem. In October the colonel had foiled a coup against Mr. Diem by Gen. Nguyen Van Hinh, the army Chief of Staff, by inviting General Hinh’s two key aides to visit the Philippines for a tour of secret projects.

  The authors of the Lansdale group’s report do not specifically state that the team’s instructions included supporting Mr. Diem against internal non-Communist opposition. But it is apparent from Colonel Lansdale’s actions that he considered this an important part of his mission.

  During the fall of 1954 Colonel Lansdale helped Mr. Diem recruit, pay and train reliable bodyguards. He had been shocked to discover when he visited Mr. Diem at the palace during a coup attempt that the official bodyguards had all deserted. “Not a guard was left on the grounds,” the report says. “President Diem was alone upstairs, calmly getting his work done.”

  With permission from the embassy, the Saigon Military Mission then began secretly paying funds to a Cao Dai leader, Gen. Trinh Minh The, who offered his services to Premier Diem.

  Colonel Lansdale also brought from the Philippines President Magsaysay’s senior military aide and three assistants to train a battalion of Vietnamese palace guards.

  When the sect crisis broke out in the spring of 1955, Colonel Lansdale visited Mr. Diem nearly every day, the S.M.M. report says. “At President Diem’s request, we had been seeing him almost nightly as tensions increased, our sessions with him lasting for hours at a time.”

  During the sect armies’ uprising, the Saigon Military Mission helped Premier Diem plan measures against the Binh Xuyen, and Colonel Lansdale repeatedly pressed the embassy to support the Premier.

  With the acting C.I.A. station chief, Colonel Lansdale formed a team to help take action against the Binh Xuyen. The S.M.M. report recounts that “all measures possible under the narrow limits permitted by U.S. policy were taken.”

  Uncharacteristically, the report adds, “These will not be described here, but there were a number of successful actions.”

  On what proved to be the crucial day, April 28, the Pentagon study reports, Premier Diem summoned Colonel Lansdale to the palace and outlined his troubles. He had just “received word from his embassy in Washington that the U.S. appeared to be about to stop supporting him.”

  This was probably a reference to Secretary Dulles’s decision of the previous day.

  Premier Diem also reported that Binh Xuyen units had begun firing on his troops.

  Colonel Lansdale sought to reassure him. “We told him that it looked as though Vietnam still needed a leader,” the report says, “that Diem was still President, that the U.S. was still supporting him.”

  That afternoon Premier Diem ordered a counterattack against the Binh Xuyen, and within nine hours achieved a major victory.

  “Washington responded with alacrity to Diem’s success, superficial though it was,” the narrative says. Saigon was told to forget Secretary Dulles’s order to drop Diem. The embassy then burned the April 27 message.

  Thereafter Mr. Diem had full American backing, the study reports, and moved with more confidence. The next October he organized a referendum to choose between himself and Bao Dai.

  After winning what the Pentagon narrative describes as a “too resounding” 98.2 per cent of the vote, Premier Diem proclaimed himself President.

  Elections Balked

  In July, 1955, under the provisions of the Geneva agreements, the two zones of Vietnam were to begin consultations on the elections scheduled for the next year.

  But Premier Diem refused to talk with the Communists. And in July, 1956, he refused to hold elections for reunification. He asserted that the South Vietnamese Government had not signed the Geneva accords and therefore was not bound by them.

  American scholars and government officials have long argued over whether the United States was responsible for Mr. Diem’s refusal to hold the elections and therefore, in a sense, whether Americans had a role in turning the Communists from politics back to warfare.

  The Pentagon study contends that the “United States did not—as it is often alleged—connive with Diem to ignore the elections. U.S. State Department records indicate that Diem’s refusal to be bound by the Geneva accords and his opposition to pre-election consultations were at his own initiative.”

  But the Pentagon account also cites State Department cables and National Security Council memorandums indicating that the Eisenhower Administration wished to
postpone the elections as long as possible and communicated its feelings to Mr. Diem.

  As early as July 7, 1954, during the Geneva conference, Secretary Dulles suggested that the United States ought to seek to delay the elections and to require guarantees that the Communists could be expected to reject.

  In a secret cablegram to Under Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith, who filled in for him after he withdrew from the Geneva conference, Secretary Dulles wrote:

  “Since undoubtedly true that elections might eventually mean unification Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, this makes it all more important they should be only held as long after cease-fire agreement as possible and in conditions free from intimidation to give democratic elements best chance.”

  Following similar reasoning the National Security Council in May, 1955, shortly before consultations on the elections were supposed to begin, produced a draft statement, “U.S. Policy on All-Vietnam Elections.”

  According to the Pentagon study, it “held that to give no impression of blocking elections while avoiding the possibility of losing them, Diem should insist on free elections by secret ballot with strict supervision. Communists in Korea and Germany had rejected these conditions; hopefully the Vietminh would follow suit.”

  But on June 9, the account says, the Council “decided to shelve the draft statement. Its main features had already been conveyed to Diem.”

  Secretary Dulles’s ambivalent attitude toward the Geneva accords is also reflected in a cablegram he sent to the United States Embassy in Saigon on Dec. 11, 1955, outlining Washington’s position toward the International Control Commission.

  “While we should certainly take no positive step to speed up present process of decay of Geneva accords,” it said, “neither should we make the slightest effort to infuse life into them.”

  In May, 1956, in what the Pentagon account says is an “example of the U.S. ignoring” the Geneva accords, 350 additional military men were sent to Saigon under the pretext of helping the Vietnamese recover and redistribute equipment abandoned by the French.

  This was “a thinly veiled device to increase the number of Americans in Vietnam,” the Pentagon account says.

  These men, who were officially designated the Temporary Equipment Recovery Mission or TERM, stayed on as a permanent part of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, the narrative says, to help in intelligence and administrative work.

  Washington dispatched the TERM group, the Pentagon study discloses, “when it was learned informally that the Indian Government would instruct its representative on the I.C.C. to interpose no objection.”

  The I.C.C. is composed of representatives from Poland, India and Canada, with the Indian usually considered the neutral representative.

  After the crisis with the sects in the spring of 1955 and the uneventful passing of the date for elections in 1956, American officials were hopeful that President Diem had succeeded.

  “It seemed for a while that the gamble against long odds had succeeded,” the Pentagon account says. “The Vietminh were quiescent; the Republic of Vietnam armed forces were markedly better armed and trained than they were when the U.S. effort began; and President Diem showed a remarkable ability to put down factions threatening the GVN [Government of Vietnam] and to maintain himself in office.”

  The American aid effort, the study reports, was focused almost entirely on security. Eight out of every 10 dollars went to security, and much of what was intended for agriculture, education, or transportation actually went to security-directed programs.

  For example, the account says, a 20-mile stretch of highway, built between Saigon and Bienhoa at the insistence of the MAAG commander, Gen. Samuel T. Williams, received more aid money than all the funds provided for labor, community development, social welfare, health and education from 1954 to 1961.

  But despite American hopes and the aid effort, the insurgency in the countryside began to pick up again in 1957 and particularly in 1959. The number of terrorist murders and kidnappings of local officials rose dramatically, and enemy units began to attack in ever-increasing size.

  As the insurgency grew, the small American intelligence network “correctly and consistently estimated” the nature of the opposition to President Diem and his own weaknesses, the Pentagon study says. The American intelligence estimates “were remarkably sound,” it adds.

  A special national intelligence estimate in August, 1960, for example, said that:

  “In the absence of more effective Government measures to protect the peasants and to win their positive cooperation, the prospect is for expansion of the areas of Vietcong control in the countryside, particularly in the southwestern provinces.

  “Dissatisfaction and discontent with the Government will probably continue to rise.

  “These adverse trends are not irreversible, but if they remain unchecked, they will almost certainly in time cause the collapse of Diem’s regime.”

  However, the study relates, “the national intelligence estimates re Diem do not appear to have restrained the N.S.C. in its major reviews of U.S. policy” toward Vietnam.

  The basic Eisenhower Administration policy papers on Southeast Asia in 1956, 1958 and 1960 repeated American objectives in “virtually identical” language, the Pentagon account reports.

  According to the 1956 paper by the National Security Council, these were among the goals of American policy toward Vietnam:

  • “Assist Free Vietnam to develop a strong, stable and constitutional government to enable Free Vietnam to assert an increasingly attractive contrast to conditions in the present Communist zone.”

  • “Work toward the weakening of the Communists in North and South Vietnam in order to bring about the eventual peaceful reunification of a free and independent Vietnam under anti-Communist leadership.”

  • “Support the position of the Government of Free Vietnam that all-Vietnam elections may take place only after it is satisfied that genuinely free elections can be held throughout both zones of Vietnam.”

  During the late nineteen-fifties, the study relates, United States officials in Saigon were also optimistic in their public comments about the situation, despite the pessimistic secret reports they forwarded to Washington.

  “While classified policy paper thus dealt with risks,” the account says, “public statements of U.S. officials did not refer to the jeopardy. To the contrary, the picture presented the public and Congress by Ambassador Durbrow, General Williams and other Administration spokesmen was of continuing progress, virtually miraculous improvement, year in and year out.”

  Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow and General Williams for example, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the summer of 1959 that Vietnam’s internal security was “in no serious danger” and that South Vietnam was in a better position that ever before to cope with an invasion from the North.

  The next spring General Williams wrote to Senator Mike Mansfield that President Diem was doing so well that the United States could begin a “phased withdrawal” of American advisers in 1961.

  That was the situation that confronted President Kennedy when he took office early in 1961.

  “The U.S. had gradually developed a special commitment in South Vietnam,” writes the Pentagon analyst charged with explaining the problems facing President Kennedy. “It was certainly not absolutely binding—but the commitment was there . . .”

  “Without U.S. support,” the analyst says, “Diem almost certainly could not have consolidated his hold on the South during 1955 and 1956.

  “Without the threat of U.S. intervention, South Vietnam could not have refused to even discuss the elections called for in 1956 under the Geneva settlement without being immediately overrun by the Vietminh armies.

  “Without U.S. aid in the years following, the Diem regime certainly, and an independent South Vietnam almost as certainly, could not have survived . . .”

  In brief, the analyst concludes, “South Vietnam was essentially the creation of the United States
.”

  KEY DOCUMENTS

  Following are the texts of key documents accompanying the Pentagon’s study of the Vietnam war, covering events in the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations. Except where excerpting is specified, the documents appear verbatim, with only unmistakable typographical errors corrected.

  # 1

  Report of Ho’s Appeals to U.S. in ’46 to Support Independence

  Cablegram from an American diplomat in Hanoi, identified as Landon, to State Department, Feb. 27, 1946, as provided in the body of the Pentagon study.

  Ho Chi Minh handed me 2 letters addressed to President of USA, China, Russia, and Britain identical copies of which were stated to have been forwarded to other governments named. In 2 letters to Ho Chi Minh request USA as one of United Nations to support idea of Annamese independence according to Philippines example, to examine the case of the Annamese, and to take steps necessary to maintenance of world peace which is being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina. He asserts that Annamese will fight until United Nations interfered in support of Annamese independence. The petition addressed to major United Nations contains:

  A. Review of French relations with Japanese where French Indochina allegedly aided Japs:

  B. Statement of establishment on 2 September 1945 of PENW Democratic Republic of Viet Minh:

  C. Summary of French conquest of Cochin China began 23 Sept 1945 and still incomplete:

  D. Outline of accomplishments of Annamese Government in Tonkin including popular elections, abolition of undesirable taxes, expansion of education and resumption as far as possible of normal economic activities:

  E. Request to 4 powers: (1) to intervene and stop the war in Indochina in order to mediate fair settlement and (2) to bring the Indochinese issue before the United Nations organization. The petition ends with the statement that Annamese ask for full independence in fact and that in interim while awaiting UNO decision the Annamese will continue to fight the reestablishment of French imperialism. Letters and petition will be transmitted to Department soonest.