by Max Boot
Lansdale journeyed to a Hoa Hao stronghold in the Mekong Delta on June 19, 1954, for a graduation ceremony for some Hoa Hao troops. There he met the Hoa Hao general Tran Van Soai, a former bus driver who was so tempestuous that he was nicknamed Nam Lua (Five Fires). Another Hoa Hao general, Le Quang Vinh, earned the nickname Ba Cut (Third Finger Cut) after he chopped off his own middle finger to show his men how committed he was to their cause.29 Lansdale’s conversation with Nam Lua, “a crafty old peasant with big curled up mustaches,” was labored: the general spoke in his own Vietnamese dialect, which was translated into French by one interpreter and then from French into English by another. Sensing that this cumbersome translation process was impeding rather than abetting communication, Lansdale said, “I acted impulsively and went over and drew him away from our interpreters with my arm around him, Filipino style . . . at which he gave me a big bear hug. Neither of us could talk to the other. Heck of a thing, huh? But he wound up telling his military to listen to me and the welcome mat would be out always.”30
Another sect leader Lansdale met, Colonel Jean Leroy, was a Catholic warlord born of a French father and Vietnamese mother who had served as a French army officer. Leroy presided over his home province of Ben Tre like a medieval despot; he “struck,” Graham Greene wrote, “with the suddenness and cruelty of a tiger, at the Communists in his region.”31 “Short, wiry, and intense,”32 Leroy reminded Lansdale of his Philippine army friend Colonel Napoleon Valeriano, who as head of the “Skull Squadron” had also been accused of committing atrocities against Communist forces: “I have to sort of pinch myself now and then,” Lansdale wrote, “to realize they are different people.”33 Lansdale got the measure of Leroy when on June 15, 1954, he went to the warlord’s house in Saigon, which looked like a fortress “with its barbed wire barriers, the sandbagged machine gun positions in the yard, and heavily armed troops at every vantage point.” Leroy had forcibly evicted the previous occupants, and now he “was daring them to start a fight for the house if they had the guts to do so.”34
Despite the rough tactics employed by Nam Lua, Jean Leroy, and other sect leaders, Lansdale was impressed by their desire to resist the Vietminh and drawn to their resilience, even as many of the French were succumbing to the inevitability of a defeat for the “Free World.” “The only people I have found, so far, who have the will to fight are the so-called ‘confessional’ armies, including the Catholics, and some of the folks up in the Delta,” he wrote.35 The sect armies were asking him to train and fund “fifty commando teams for psy war,” but he was “finding excuses” not to, “simply because I don’t think they have a chance now, and I hate to slap their fannies and get them out fighting when I know they are going to be deserted by the French and us. It’s hard enough on a guy to send men out to die in a good cause, a rotten thing when all the cards are stacked against success.”36
Lansdale was considerably less impressed by another sect based in Saigon, this one criminal rather than religious. The Binh Xuyen (pronounced bean-zuyen) had grown up from pirate bands in the 1920s to take over the underworld of Cholon, Saigon’s Chinatown, and its lucrative opium trade. In April 1954, Emperor Bao Dai, desperate for revenue to finance his opulent lifestyle, had sold the position of chief of police of Saigon to the Binh Xuyen general Le Van Vien, known as Bay Vien, for a reported payment of forty-four million piastres ($1.25 million). It was as if Chicago had made Al Capone its police chief.37 Bay Vien had gotten his start working as a chauffeur for a small-time gangster. Now he had ten thousand men under arms.38 His holdings included a giant casino known as Le Grand Monde and a giant bordello known as Le Parc aux Buffles. Bay Vien ruled this criminal empire from a fortified villa, where he kept a pet tiger and a giant boa constrictor; “rumor had it,” wrote one American diplomat, “that the tiger’s diet varied depending on the unexplained, permanent disappearances of the general’s enemies.”39
Lansdale saw for himself the Binh Xuyen’s thuggish tactics one sultry evening in June 1954. He was in his second-floor room at the MAAG bachelor officers’ quarters, “attempting to read local French newspapers with the aid of a translator’s dictionary,” when he was interrupted by a phone call from a woman with a Southern accent, demanding to know, “What are all these strange soldiers doing shooting around the house?” The caller turned out to be one of three American embassy secretaries living a few blocks away. They were cowering under their beds, because of the sounds of fighting coming from next door. Lansdale gallantly walked over to rescue them. He found a company of Binh Xuyen troops, distinctive in their green berets, firing into a two-story bungalow next to the secretaries’ house. Their submachine-gun bursts were answered with grenades being hurled out of the house, which caused “a wild scramble for safety among the attackers.” Employing his “atrocious French,” Lansdale talked to the Binh Xuyen commander, who told him he was trying to arrest someone inside the house, a Vietnamese detective who “had been too effective in fighting crime.” Barricaded inside his house, the detective shouted that he would surrender only to the Vietnamese National Army. Lansdale persuaded the Binh Xuyen to let him escort the detective to the Vietnamese army headquarters.40
From this experience, Lansdale drew a small lesson and a big one. The small, practical lesson: “A man could stay safe behind walls and keep a company of troops at bay with hand grenades tossed through windows or doors. From then on, I kept a supply of grenades in my own living quarters.”41 The larger moral was about how corrupt and decadent southern Vietnam had become—and how divided and dysfunctional. “I am deciding against ever trying to establish our family in the midst of so much apparent evil,” Ed wrote to Helen.42
BEYOND LEARNING what he could, there was not much that Lansdale could do to influence the situation upon his arrival; all seemed in abeyance, amid an atmosphere of “deepening gloom,”43 pending the outcome of an international conference that had convened in Geneva on April 26, 1954, to broker a deal between the French and the Vietminh.
Lansdale tried to teach “psywar” techniques to Vietnamese troops, his curriculum focusing, as in the Philippines, on trying to improve “the relationship between the troops and the people.” He did not have much success. “Hungry and ill-paid troops still stole chickens, pigs, and rice during military operations,” Lansdale lamented. The French “found my ideas alien,” he wrote, “and suggested laughingly that I take up smoking opium instead.” Lansdale realized that to change the situation would require “some new direction from the top.”44 That new direction arrived, unexpectedly, on June 25, 1954, in the form of an “honest mystic,”45 as he had been dubbed by the CIA, who had just been named prime minister of the state of Vietnam.
LANSDALE KNEW nothing about Ngo Dinh Diem (pronounced no-din-zee’em in northern Vietnam and yee’em in the south). He was surprised to discover, once he talked to his new Vietnamese acquaintances, that Diem was “exceptionally well known” and that “people either admired him or disliked him. Few were neutral. All agreed that he was notably honest and had a strong character.” Most believed that “Diem was a great patriot, probably the best of all the nationalists still living, with an outstanding record as a wise and able administrator.” “A minority view,” on the other hand, “held that Diem was mulishly stubborn, too aloof to be a good political leader, and should have obeyed his boyhood wish to become a monk.”46 This was an early indication of how polarizing a political figure Diem would turn out to be.
Diem had been born in Quang Binh Province, which would become part of North Vietnam, on January 3, 1901, making him a decade younger than Ho Chi Minh and a decade older than Vo Nguyen Giap. His father, Ngo Dinh Kha, was a devout Catholic who took the family to mass every morning, as well as a traditional mandarin who sported two-inch fingernails, a black turban, and a silk robe. He rose to become grand chamberlain and keeper of the eunuchs in the court of Emperor Thanh Thai, but resigned when the French deposed Thanh Thai in 1907 for having demanded more autonomy.47 From their father, Diem and his eight sibli
ngs (five boys and three girls) inherited the three faiths—Confucianism, Catholicism, and nationalism—that would define their lives.
Diem was rigorously educated in Catholic schools, where he learned French, Latin, and classical Chinese. He entered a monastery briefly at age fifteen. But unlike his older brother Ngo Dinh Thuc, who became a bishop, he decided against the priesthood; Thuc said “the Church was too worldly for him.”48 After studying at the same French lycée in Hue that Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap also attended, Diem went to the School of Administration in Hanoi to prepare for a job in the imperial bureaucracy. Here he experienced the only romance of his life with the daughter of one of his instructors, and after she broke off their unconsummated relationship to join a convent, he remained celibate for the rest of his life.
After graduating in 1921, Diem rose quickly, becoming by age twenty-five a province chief with three hundred villages under his supervision. He was police chief and judge, tax collector and public works administrator, all at the same time. “Wearing a conical straw hat and a mandarin robe,” a journalist later wrote, “he rode around the countryside on horseback and dealt more closely with the villagers than he ever would again.”49 Despite his budding nationalism, Diem won French favor by cracking down on Communist plots. In 1933, still only thirty years old, he was appointed minister of the interior. Yet he resigned after just two months in office, because the French refused to grant the Vietnamese any power to govern themselves. Thus, like his father, Diem staked out his credentials as a nationalist. Ellen J. Hammer, an early American scholar of Vietnam who knew Diem personally, was to write, “Nothing he ever did became him better than his decision to resign from that post.”50
Instead of embracing a life of political intrigue, as Ho Chi Minh had done, Diem retired to the family home in Hue to pursue a quieter life of meditation, study, hobbies (photography, flower raising, horseback riding, hunting), and daily mass attendance in accordance with what Hammer described as “the Confucian tradition that a scholar during a difficult period of history should retire to a tranquil spot and wait for better times in which he might be useful.”51
Once the Vietminh seized power in August 1945, they began rounding up non-Communist politicians. Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Khoi was arrested and executed along with his son. Diem himself was arrested and detained in a remote jungle camp, where he contracted malaria, dysentery, and influenza. By early 1946, however, Ho Chi Minh was trying to form a government that did not look entirely Communist and saw the potential usefulness of Diem. In their one and only meeting, Ho offered Diem the post of minister of the interior, but Diem refused to accept the job from his brother’s killer and reportedly called Ho a criminal to his face.52 In a rare display of magnanimity, Ho Chi Minh allowed Ngo Dinh Diem to walk free. Four years later, however, the Vietminh pronounced a death sentence on Diem and the French refused to protect him, so he left the country.
Diem moved to the United States, where he lived in two seminaries, in New Jersey and New York, as the guest of Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York. For the next three years, he cultivated not only conservative Catholics but also liberals drawn to the dream of a “third way,” neither colonialist nor Communist. The most important patron Diem acquired was the liberal, deeply contrarian Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. He thought Diem was “the kind of Asian we can live with”53 and on May 7, 1953, hosted a lunch at the Supreme Court in Diem’s honor. The guests included Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, a former professor of Asian history, and the newly elected senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, recently returned from a trip to Indochina.54
The backing that Diem received from prominent Americans was crucial to his appointment as prime minister—not, as widely rumored in Saigon, because the American government pushed for him to get the job, as it had pushed for Ramon Magsaysay to become defense minister and president in the Philippines, but, rather, because after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, Emperor Bao Dai understood that the future of “free” Vietnam depended on American support, and who better to obtain that support than a man who was a personal friend of Cardinal Spellman and Justice Douglas? So despite his well-founded reservations about Diem’s “fanaticism and his messianic tendencies,”55 Bao Dai thrust South Vietnam’s future into his hands on June 16, 1954.
DIEM WAS due to arrive back in Saigon, which was still under French control, on June 25. A diplomatic reception was laid on for him at Tan Son Nhut Airport. Lansdale was driving there in his “vacuum cleaner Citroen”56 when he was struck by the “crowds jamming both sides of the road.” “The population of this wartime capital usually was too blasé even to glance at dignitaries in limousines or at the martial passing of troop convoys and tanks,” he wrote. “Yet here they were by the thousands, obviously waiting to see just one man.” Intrigued, Lansdale parked his car “and joined the massed crowd along the curbstones.”
Even though Diem’s flight was delayed, Lansdale observed, whole families waited for hours in the hot sunshine as street cart vendors “did a land-office business” selling the sweet juice of freshly crushed sugarcane. Eventually the crowd could hear “a wail of sirens and the pop-popping of motorcycles.” People pushed forward to get a look at their new leader. But all they saw was a “big black limousine, Vietnamese flags fluttering from holders on its fenders, windows closed, passengers invisible in its deep interior,” Lansdale wrote. “Whoosh! Limousine and entourage were past. The crowds of people looked at one another in disappointment. Was that him? Did you see him? He didn’t even see us! They broke up in a disgruntled mood.”57
Lansdale went back to the embassy and reported to Ambassador Donald Heath that Diem and his advisers were misjudging the “mood of the people.” “Diem,” he believed, “should have ridden into the city slowly in an open car, or even have walked, to provide a focus for the affection that the people so obviously had been waiting to bestow on him.” What Lansdale did not realize was that Diem’s younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had arranged a carefully choreographed welcome reception in the center of the city, where Diem received a “vibrant ovation” from the gathered crowd. A modern scholar, Edward Miller, argues that the success of the downtown reception shows that Diem was not “as hapless and unaware of his political surroundings as Lansdale suggested.”58 That may be true but, as subsequent events (leading eventually to Diem’s overthrow and murder) were to show, Lansdale was right to doubt Diem’s political acumen. Scholarly and reclusive, long-winded and uncharismatic, Diem fit no one’s image of a dynamic leader.
Still, Diem was the best candidate yet for the job, and with his arrival Lansdale finally had a focus for his work. He spent the rest of the day and all night on June 25–26 working on a memorandum offering the new prime minister suggestions on how to govern. He called for integrating all of the sect paramilitary forces into the armed forces, bringing together the nationalist political parties in an anti-Communist coalition, creating public forums around the countryside where government representatives could hear from the people, immediately adopting a Philippine-style constitution, and much else besides.59 The sun had risen by the time Lansdale finished this paper. He showed it to Ambassador Heath and General O’Daniel. While they approved of its contents, they said the U.S. government could not officially present such a document—it would look too much like meddling in Vietnam’s internal affairs. But if the CIA operative wanted to present the paper as a “personal one,” he was free to do so. So with George Hellyer, a French-speaking public information officer, in tow as translator, Lansdale marched from the U.S. embassy near the Saigon River to the Gia Long Palace to present his recommendations to Diem.
Symptomatic of the chaos that gripped the whole country in the wake of the French defeat, Lansdale found the palace in a “disorganized state”: “There were no guards to challenge our entry, no civil servants to receive visitors.” An aide hurrying by with a stack of documents told them the prime minister was upstairs, so up they went. The hallway was empty, but one office door was slightly
ajar, so they stuck their heads into a small office where a table was covered in a towering stack of paperwork. “Seated at the table,” Lansdale wrote, “was a middle-aged Vietnamese, who looked up at us from a document he was reading as we entered. At first glance, he wasn’t very impressive. A roly-poly figure dressed in a white sharkskin, double-breasted suit, his feet were not quite touching the floor. He must be very short-legged, I thought. Intensely black hair, combed strictly, topped a broad face in which the most prominent feature was high rounds of flesh over the cheekbones, as if they had been pushed up there by constant smiling.” Hellyer explained they were looking for the prime minister. “I am Ngo Dinh Diem,” the man behind the table replied in fluent, if accented, French.
Lansdale introduced himself and handed over his document to Diem. The prime minister, Lansdale noted, “listened intently, asking some searching questions, thanked me for my thoughtfulness, folded up the paper, and put it in his pocket.”60 “Although the plan was not adopted, it laid the foundation for a friendship which has lasted,” Lansdale later wrote.61 The two men would never grow as close as Lansdale and Magsaysay had become; Diem was not a man who entered into close friendships with anyone outside his family, much less with a foreigner. But in spite of their continuing need for a translator, the fun-loving secret agent from Southern California and the ascetic mandarin from central Vietnam gradually developed a relationship of “considerable depth, trust, and candor,” as Lansdale wrote.62
