A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

by Sheehan, Neil

  Secretly, Lodge put Lou Conein to work as his liaison to three dissident ARVN generals. To remove the Ngo Dinhs, Lodge utilized some of the same senior ARVN officers whom Conein had worked with at Lansdale’s direction in 1955 to install Diem as America’s man in Saigon. They had been colonels then, and Diem had made them generals for coming over to his side. He and his family had later alienated them. They were all members of the small Franco-Vietnamese elite the colonial system had created and had been French citizens until 1955. They would have left with the French Expeditionary Corps had they not been encouraged by American power and money and its representatives like Lansdale and Conein to stay and attempt to preserve in the South the colonial society in which they had been reared.

  The leader of the plot was the second-ranking general in the ARVN, Maj. Gen. Duong Van Minh, forty-seven, “Big Minn” as he was called for his six-foot build. He was from a well-to-do Southern family, born at My Tho, and had attended the best French lycée in Saigon as a youth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, the same school where Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia had been educated. Prior to 1945 he had belonged to the exclusive group of fifty Vietnamese who held a commission in the French Army. Minn’s height and broad shoulders were not the only reason for his unusual appearance. His two upper front teeth had been broken by the interrogators of the Kempeitai, the dreaded Japanese military police, when the Imperial Army suddenly disarmed the Vichy French forces in Indochina in 1945. He refused to have the teeth replaced. In early 1955, during the street fighting with the Binh Xuyen and the maneuvering of the pro-Bao Dai officers to oust Lansdale’s man, Minh had been able to help Diem as commanding officer of the Saigon garrison. Later he had been put in charge of destroying the army of the Hoa Hao sect in the Delta. By 1963, Diem had sidetracked him into the fictitious post of military advisor to the president. (“Since Diem accepts no advice, Minh has lots of time to scheme,” Colonel Dong remarked.)

  Minn’s most important associate in the plot was another officer who had rallied to Diem’s support at Lansdale’s and Conein’s behest in the spring of 1955 and who had been more adept at holding some of Diem’s trust in the intervening years—Maj. Gen. Tran Van Don, forty-six, chief of staff of the ARVN in 1963. Don was the unusually handsome son of an aristocratic family; he had been born in France, near Bordeaux, and had attended the Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Paris before World War II and the French Army.

  Don’s brother-in-law, Brig. Gen. Le Van Kim, forty-five, was the third plotter. Kim had been a general without an assignment for nearly three years by 1963, having been fired as head of the Military Academy by Diem on suspicion of complicity in the abortive 1960 paratrooper coup. He had studied mathematics and philosophy in Marseilles, joined the French Army in 1939, fought against the Germans, and then been commissioned after the war. His bookish manner had given Kim a reputation as the intellectual of the ARVN.

  Lodge had a talent for selecting subordinates with the credentials to perform a particular task for him. In Conein he had the perfect liaison to the plotters. These men trusted Conein as they would not have trusted another CIA agent. He was an old comrade, and his French birth fortified the relationship. When he was with them he saw that his French side came out, because he lived in both cultures in spirit and he knew that it put them at ease. Conein had been bored for the last several years with his job as pacification advisor to the Ministry of the Interior, and from his vantage point the stakes were far higher this time than in 1955. Few secret agents are ever given an opportunity to scale the professional summit by arranging the overthrow of a government. Conein was transmitting the power of the United States to influence these generals to do its bidding. The clandestine meetings, the passing back and forth of messages between Lodge and the plotters, the coaxing along of the generals, all had the emotional lift of a strong amphetamine. Lives were being risked, including Conein’s, and, he believed, the destinies of two nations were in the balance.

  Harkins was opposed to a coup. He did not want to disrupt the war he thought he was winning. He regarded Diem as a satisfactory local ruler and viewed the Buddhist crisis as a passing intrigue. The raids on the pagodas were an unfortunate loss of temper. The Nhus were to blame for the raids, and Diem might be coaxed into parting with them in time. Harkins had other allies in Washington besides Taylor. Mc-Namara and Rusk also saw the situation essentially as he did.

  Lodge knew that he would lose if he confronted Harkins and the system, despite the additional weight with Kennedy that his independent political stature gave him. He therefore handled Harkins by indirection, and Harkins, who thought himself a master bureaucrat, was outwitted at his game. Lodge was always polite in his personal dealings with Harkins, and when he had to refer to him in a cable he called him “a splendid general and an old friend of mine.” He then hid from Harkins his cables to Washington about Conein’s meetings with the generals (sent for greater security through the CIA’s separate communications system) until it was too late for Harkins to interfere effectively. Minh and Don helped Lodge by confusing Harkins even then as to whether there was a plot. Because they were afraid that he would betray them to Diem, they lied and told the general they were not planning a coup. Lodge also undercut Harkins’s judgment on the war. He sent Kennedy independent assessments (again without copies to the general) that contradicted Harkins’s optimism. Once more Lodge was careful not to confront. He did not assert baldly that the war was being lost. He said this by filling his reports with the bad news that Harkins was suppressing and by letting others say it for him. The plotters were of help here too. These Saigon generals knew they were losing the war, which was another reason they were so eager to overthrow the Ngo Dinhs. On September 19, Lodge sent a top-secret cable marked “for President only” giving Minn’s view that

  the Viet Cong are steadily gaining in strength; have more of the population on their side than has the GVN [Government of Vietnam—the Saigon regime]; that arrests are continuing and that the prisons are full; that more and more students are going over to the Viet Cong; that there is great graft and corruption in the Vietnamese administration of our aid; and that the “Heart of the Army is not in the war.” [Emphasis Lodge’s]

  This assessment by “Vietnamese No. 1 general” (Minh was considered by Americans, including Harkins, to be the most professional of the Saigon generals) was being “echoed” by Diem’s faithful acting minister of defense, Nguyen Dinh Thuan, “who wants to leave the country,” Lodge went on to tell Kennedy. He also warned in other cables against Harkins’s claim that Diem was a good man who was being victimized by the Nhus and might eventually be persuaded to rid the regime of them. He pointed out that the brothers did not see the world differently and that Diem was convinced he needed Nhu’s skill at manipulating the police and intelligence services in order to keep the army in check. Diem “wishes he had more Nhus, not less,” Lodge said.

  Kennedy was uncertain and wavered. He had virtually no understanding of political and social revolution in modern Asia and little feeling for the realities of counterguerrilla warfare. He feared a wave of Communist-inspired guerrilla wars in the underdeveloped countries and was determined to build a capability to crush them, but he lacked knowledge of what he feared. Had he possessed sensitivity on the subject, he would have stopped Harkins and Anthis from bombing and shelling the Vietnamese peasantry. He was constantly issuing instructions and suggestions for counterguerrilla warfare to the Army through his military aide, Maj. Gen. Chester Clifton, Jr. His ideas never went much beyond employing Special Forces men, popularly known as Green Berets because of their headgear, in “Terry and the Pirates” ventures and the sort of technological gimmickry and superspy intrigues that filled the James Bond novels he liked to read. It was Kennedy who had given the Special Forces their romantic headgear to mark them as the shock troops of his “wars in the shadows.”

  At a National Security Council meeting at the White House on Friday, September 6, 1963, he accepted a suggestion from McNamara to fly Krulak out in a
jet to “get the facts” and report back to the NSC by Tuesday. Hilsman interjected that a State Department representative should also go along for an independent viewpoint. Kennedy agreed. McNamara tried to outsmart Hilsman by putting Krulak in the air to Vietnam within minutes of the end of the meeting. Hilsman telephoned and made him hold the plane until he could get his man, Joseph Mendenhall, the former political counselor of the embassy, out to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington. The plane was a windowless Boeing 707, an Air Force tanker version of the four-engine passenger jet, converted for the ferrying of important men by the installation of desks and bunks. The type had been nicknamed the McNamara Special because of the secretary’s fondness for fly-and-sprint trips. Twenty thousand miles and four days later Krulak and Mendenhall read diametrically opposed reports to another NSC meeting at the White House on Tuesday, September 10.

  “You two did visit the same country, didn’t you?” Kennedy asked.

  “I can explain it, Mr. President,” Krulak said. “Mr. Mendenhall visited the cities and I visited the countryside and the war is in the countryside.”

  “I want to see you after this in my office,” Kennedy said to Krulak.

  McNamara accompanied Krulak into the Oval Office when the meeting had ended. The president looked up from something he was reading. “I just wanted you to know that I understand,” he said to Krulak, indicating by his manner that he was preoccupied and did not wish to talk. Krulak and McNamara left. In the limousine on the way back to the Pentagon, McNamara and Taylor were pleased. They interpreted Kennedy’s remark in the Oval Office as meaning: “I understand what happened and I agree with you.” Krulak was also happy. He interpreted the president’s remark similarly and was convinced that he had put down Mendenhall.

  Kennedy may have agreed with Krulak, but he sent McNamara and Taylor to Vietnam two weeks later for more “facts.” One of Lodge’s independent assessments may have prompted him, perhaps the cable relaying Minh’s frightening views. By the end of September, when the jet carrying McNamara and Taylor lifted off from Tan Son Nhut with another report for Kennedy, one could drive down to My Tho and see the ghosts of the strategic hamlets along the road. The lines of steel fence posts with shreds of chopped-off barbed wire hanging from the notches announced who owned most of this main route into the Delta. From a helicopter the sense of the guerrillas’ power was greater and the sight of these ghost hamlets stranger. The rows of roofless houses looked like villages of play huts that children had erected and then whimsically abandoned.

  McNamara and Taylor assured Kennedy that “the military campaign has made great progress and continues to progress,” despite “serious political tensions in Saigon,” and that the war would still be won by the end of 1965. Harkins should win it sooner in the rubber-plantation country and in the Highlands and the Central Coast provinces north of Saigon, they said in their top-secret memorandum of October 2. He should crush the Viet Cong there by the end of 1964. The slower progress in the Delta would delay the defeat of the guerrillas south of the capital until the end of 1965, and “it should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.” They recommended pulling out 1,000 Americans by the end of 1963 in order to demonstrate how well the plans for victory were being implemented. The White House announced a forthcoming withdrawal of this first 1,000 men.

  The president gained no peace of mind. The analysts at the CIA told him that Saigon’s military position was deteriorating, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research said that there had been “an unfavorable shift in the military balance” since July and that the regime would have been in trouble in the countryside even without the Buddhist crisis.

  Kennedy showed how confused he was and how angry he had become at the messenger who most annoyed him when Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who had recently become publisher of the Times, paid a courtesy call at the White House on October 22. As soon as the pleasantries were over Kennedy asked: “What do you think of your young man in Saigon?” Sulzberger said that he thought Halberstam was holding up well. “Don’t you think he’s too close to the story?” Kennedy asked. No, Sulzberger said, he did not. Kennedy pushed harder. Had Sulzberger thought about transferring Halberstam? he asked. Sulzberger said that he had no plans to do so. If Kennedy had not been so upset, he probably would not have taken such a crude approach. Sulzberger was reacting defensively, as publishers almost always do when their reporters are attacked. Catledge, the managing editor in New York who had been so upset by Halberstam, was with Sulzberger on the White House visit. He would have been happy to transfer Halberstam out of Saigon, but he could not do so while the paper might lose face.

  Halberstam, without knowing that the president had personally requested his transfer, thought that the Ngo Dinhs were going to grant Kennedy’s wish. He told Vann in a letter on October 29 that he suspected they would throw him out of Vietnam in a couple of weeks. His visa expired in mid-November. He was writing to thank Vann for having defended our reporting in letters to the editors of News week and Time. (Newsweek published Vann’s letter in its October 21, 1963, issue. Time declined to print it.) “We all still miss you and refer to you as the Bible,” Halberstam wrote. “There’s damn little joy in covering something which has such a sour meaning for your country,” he said. “The brightest spot is Lodge, whose performance for my money has been near perfect. He’s tough and intelligent and he has few illusions about this situation; he doesn’t intend to see the U.S. kicked around, and he … doesn’t think this Ngo outfit is worth a tinker’s damn.” The weaponry and firepower of the Viet Cong battalions in the Delta was getting “better and better … very ominous,” Halberstam told Vann. “And watching a police state in action, particularly an American-financed one, is a sad experience. But we still have a chance, I guess, and I like the way Lodge handles himself.”

  Kennedy ended by deferring to Lodge’s judgment. Lodge had exacted what he needed from McNamara and Taylor during their late-September visit. In response to his arguments they had conceded in their memorandum to Kennedy that “further repressive actions by Diem and Nhu could change the present favorable military trends” and had recommended the suspension of economic aid and the cutting off of military and CIA support for Tung’s Special Forces as a way of exerting pressure for conciliation and reform. Lodge had wanted both measures in order to hold up the largest possible “Go” sign to the dissident generals. Kennedy decided on October 5 to let Lodge have his way. The plotting, which had been in hiatus, resumed in earnest. Kennedy asked only that Lodge guarantee him a successful coup, that he not be forced to endure the disgrace of another Bay of Pigs. Lodge would not mislead the president. He said that he thought the plot would succeed, but he could give no guarantee. “Should the coup fail,” he cabled, “we will have to pick up the pieces as best we can at that time.”

  Diem and Nhu erected their own scaffold. Toward the end of October they discovered the plot that Lodge had been fomenting and decided to take advantage of it to spring a scheme they had conceived. They summoned General Dinh to the palace. He had continued to rule Saigon for them as its military governor since the sacking of the pagodas. The brothers instructed Dinh to draw up troop movement plans for a “false coup.” The phony coup had two purposes. The long-range purpose was to scare the Americans out of ever again attempting to interfere with their rule. This objective was to be achieved by making the false coup appear to be a “neutralist coup.” Since the surprise coup d’état in Laos in 1960 by Kong Le, the neutralist paratroop commander, Washington had feared the possibility of a similar occurrence in Saigon by some hostile or opportunistic group who would demand a U.S. withdrawal. The demand would make a mockery of the American claim that the United States was in Vietnam at the invitation of a Vietnamese government to defend the South against “outside aggression.” The National Liberation Front was calling for the replacement of the Ngo Dinhs by a neutralist coalition. Charles de Gaulle, then President of France, was also promoting the idea as a soluti
on to the war. The Kennedy administration regarded it, accurately, as a face-saving arrangement for a takeover by Ho Chi Minh. Nhu had been playing on Washington’s fear by feigning negotiations with Hanoi through Maneli, the senior Polish delegate to the ICSC, and the French ambassador. He had also been talking about the possibility of asking the Americans to withdraw and of turning South Vietnam into a country like Yugoslavia which would accept aid from both Communist and non-Communist nations.

  Nhu had been mistaking for independence the slack in the string to which he and Diem were tied. He had not realized that his blackmail had played into Lodge’s hands by further alarming Kennedy. When the brothers had sacked the pagodas they had put out a cover story to try to shift the blame from themselves by having Radio Saigon and the government press agency announce that the raids had been carried out by the army and that the generals had requested Diem to declare martial law. Under their false-coup scheme they were going to have the radio and their press agency announce the formation of a neutralist coalition and broadcast a demand that the United States pull out of the country. They would have Dinh occupy the streets and main public buildings with troops and armor and emerge and announce that they had saved South Vietnam by crushing a neutralist plot. During the confusion they planned to carry out the second and immediate purpose of their false coup—a small bloodbath. They were going to have Tung’s Special Forces and Nhu’s hired gangsters murder Minh, Don, Kim, and a number of other generals and senior ARVN officers they suspected of involvement in the plot, civilian accomplices of the generals like Diem’s titular vice-president, Nguyen Ngoc Tho, and some Americans. They would later blame the killings on “neutralist and pro-Communist elements.” How many and precisely which Americans were to be killed has never been ascertained. Lodge was supposed to have been marked, but there will never be any way of knowing. Conein was an obvious target, as Diem and Nhu had by now learned of his role in the plot. Nhu code-named the scheme Operation Bravo One.