The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  With a typical commando’s love for blowing things up, Conein hoped to do more damage by igniting the giant oil tanks in Haiphong belonging to Standard Oil and Shell. But he was ordered to stand down by the embassy in Saigon. Lansdale explained that this was due to “U.S. adherence to the Geneva Agreement.”68 But it was just as likely that the U.S. government did not want to harm two giant Western oil companies and feared that if too much damage was traceable to the CIA, the Vietminh could retaliate against the U.S. consulate in Haiphong, which would remain open until that city was handed over in May 1955.

  In addition to sabotaging the North, Conein established two “stay behind” networks. Nearly forty agents were recruited from two of the most prominent anti-Communist political parties—the Dai Viet and the Vietnam Nationalist Party (VNQDD). Both groups were transported separately in the summer of 1954 to a secret CIA training facility on the island of Saipan, where they received instruction in espionage along with “weapons, demolitions, and sabotage.” In March 1955, twelve agents from the Dai Viet were brought back to Haiphong from Saipan. Conein briefed them, gave them forged papers with their cover identities (most were pretending to be fishermen), and sent them to various locations around the North. The following month, it was the turn of the VNQDD group. As more agents were recruited and trained, Conein continued to infiltrate them into the North as late as 1956, employing either motorized junks or parachute jumps from Civil Air Transport (CAT) aircraft.69

  To supply these agents, the Lansdale team used CAT flights and Navy ships to bring in tons of supplies: radios, explosives, guns, ammunition, gold. A lot of the matériel was hidden in building basements covered with concrete to create a phony foundation. Some, almost sit-com style, was buried in coffins during phony funeral proceedings. The VNQDD group alone received fourteen radios, three hundred carbines, fifty pistols, a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition, and three hundred pounds of explosives.70 This may have seemed a considerable armory, but it was only a pittance compared with what Lansdale described as the “huge quantities of weapons, ammunition, mines, grenades, and other materiel . . . being buried secretly by the Vietminh [in South Vietnam] before they withdrew.”71

  Dick Smith, who served as logistician for the Saigon Military Mission, recalled that at the “pool house” in Saigon, team members assembled crates of equipment and used a blowtorch to remove the MAAG insignia from the boxes. Then he would fly to the North with the crates. A DC-9 aircraft would swoop down to land on a remote jungle airstrip and Smith would hop out, meet a local Vietnamese contact with a truck, hand over his cargo, and take off again. Such missions were particularly incongruous because the CAT pilots, in keeping with their cover story of working for a commercial airline, wore the same kind of uniforms that Pan Am pilots might be expected to wear on a route from Los Angeles to New York. But instead of informing him to keep his seat in the full upright position for takeoff, CAT’s pilots would ask Smith, “If we have to land in Indian country, which of these boxes should we get rid of before landing?”72

  LOU CONEIN had accomplished his mission, but his resistance networks failed to accomplish much. The efficient North Vietnamese security service penetrated the Dai Viet network and ran some of its personnel as double agents before arresting all of them in 1958. The next year they were given a show trial in Hanoi, at which the regime displayed some of the spy gear supplied by the Lansdale team—in the words of the historians Kenneth Conboy and Dale Andrade, “silenced submachine guns, explosives, small spring-loaded pistols hidden inside toothpaste tubes, and radio sets.” Working in an atmosphere of haste and improvisation, Smith and other team members had not been as thorough as they should have been in “sanitizing” the equipment: while the weapons were untraceable, “the radios were clearly marked with U.S. Army Signal Corps plates.” Most of these agents received long prison sentences; their leader was executed by firing squad. The VNQDD network lasted longer. Ten of its agents were uncovered in 1964 and put on trial the following year; two were executed and the rest sent to prison. Eleven other agents remained operational until 1974—that is, almost until the end of the South Vietnamese state and nearly twenty years after beginning their assignments.73 But they did not carry out any substantial sabotage operations, and Donald Gregg, who served as CIA desk officer for Vietnam from 1962 to 1964, does not recall any important intelligence produced by Lansdale’s agents or any others in the North.74

  Left unanswered is the question of how these networks were ultimately exposed. The North Vietnamese claimed to have run across them by accident—for example, a lump of explosive “coal” was discovered in Hanoi during a police crackdown on black-market coal sales and traced back to its source. This may well have been true, or it could have been a cover story put out by a savvy intelligence service to protect its true source of information inside the South Vietnamese government.

  One of the most successful North Vietnamese deep-cover agents in South Vietnam was, in fact, close to Lansdale and his team. Pham Xuan An became a well-known correspondent in Saigon, working for the New York Herald Tribune, Reuters, and Time magazine. He befriended prominent American correspondents such as David Halberstam and Morley Safer, all the while secretly sending intelligence reports to Hanoi. After the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, he was revealed to be a general in the North Vietnamese army. An had gotten his start as a Vietminh agent in 1954 while working for his cousin, Captain Pham Xuan Giai, in the South Vietnamese army’s psychological warfare directorate, G-5, at a time when it was closely cooperating with the Saigon Military Mission. An said that his training in psychological operations came from Lansdale himself. Lansdale joked with him, because An seemed so artless, “An, you would make a terrible spy.”75 Lansdale even arranged for the Asia Foundation, a CIA front group, to send An to college in California.76 An so admired the American operative—“Lansdale was excellent, really excellent,” he later said—that he went so far as to imitate his mentor’s habit of going everywhere with a dog, in his case a German shepherd. He was also close to Lou Conein (a “very good friend”) and Rufus Phillips (a “close friend”).77

  Given An’s proximity to the Saigon Military Mission, it is possible he played a role in exposing its operations in the North even if Lansdale did not intend to share any secrets with him. If An was not the culprit, there were plenty of other possible suspects; the South Vietnamese government was full of Communist moles.

  Ultimately, the failure of Lansdale’s sabotage and intelligence operations in North Vietnam—which stood in marked contrast to his success at resettling refugees in the South—was hardly surprising. The same fate befell other CIA operations in the early Cold War years to infiltrate agents into Communist countries. All ended, without exception, in tragedy, with agents swiftly captured and either imprisoned or killed. One of Rufus Phillips’s Yale fraternity brothers, John “Jack” Downey, was shot down on such a mission over Chinese airspace in 1952; he would spend the next twenty years in a Chinese prison. Communist police states were simply too effective at internal surveillance and Western intelligence services were too riddled with Communist spies for such missions to have much chance of success.

  This was a bitter lesson that Lansdale would learn anew when he was tasked nearly a decade later with penetrating Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

  15

  Pacification

  I guess there’s nobody here as the personal representative of the people of the United States. . . . So, I hereby appoint myself as their representative—and we’re walking out on you.

  —EDWARD LANSDALE TO LIGHTNING JOE COLLINS

  THE creation of modern nation-states in Europe was a protracted and bloody business. In the Middle Ages, the continent was divided into roughly a thousand political entities—duchies, free cities, kingdoms, republics, and the like. By 1789, there remained only 350 and by 1900 a mere 25.1 Countless conflicts such as the War of the Roses, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Wars of German Unification had to be fought before the map of Europe could assume its
modern shape. The whole process took hundreds of years.

  In South Vietnam, the nation-building experience began in earnest in mid-1954, and its first stages had to be completed before mid-1956, when a national reunification election was scheduled. Actually there was even less time than that. Ngo Dinh Diem’s authority at first was so tenuous that, if he did not show immediate success, he would lose the support not only of local power brokers but also of his primary outside sponsors, France and the United States, which somehow expected South Vietnam to develop virtually overnight the kind of strong and responsive central government that had taken centuries to emerge elsewhere. Even as he was supervising the movement of refugees from North Vietnam and trying to subvert the Hanoi regime, Edward Lansdale took on the herculean challenge of trying to consolidate Diem’s power. He would have to figure out how to fill the power vacuum in the countryside that would be left by departing Vietminh cadres. But first he had to make sure that Diem wasn’t toppled in a coup d’état.

  THE MOST immediate threat came from the armed forces chief of staff, General Nguyen Van Hinh, a career French officer. When Diem tried to give Hinh orders, the general replied that he answered only to Emperor Bao Dai. When Diem threatened to dismiss him, Hinh replied, in effect, that he would get rid of Diem first. Hinh dropped a broad hint to Lansdale of what he was up to by brandishing a silver cigarette box given to him by President Muhammad Naguib of Egypt, the leader along with Gamal Abdel Nasser of a military coup two years earlier.2

  Behind the scenes, the army chief and the prime minister carried out what Lansdale described as a “dirty, gangster-type of warfare of tommy-gun fire from moving vehicles, grenades thrown into houses, kidnappings and torture.”3 Lansdale saw for himself the depth of enmity between Diem and Hinh on September 8, 1954, when he walked into the Defense Ministry to find the five-foot-tall defense minister Le Ngoc Chan in an armed confrontation with two of Hinh’s men, Lieutenant Colonel Tranh Dinh Lan and Captain Pham Xuan Giai. They were pointing submachine guns at Chan, telling him they had orders to arrest him; Chan was holding a revolver, saying he was going to arrest them.4 Lansdale defused this standoff, but the next week the rift became public knowledge when Hinh sent an armored platoon to “guard”—really, to seize—the South Vietnamese army radio station. Before long, the station was broadcasting vitriolic anti-Diem propaganda.

  Lansdale knew that Lieutenant Nguyen Van Minh, the officer in charge of the radio station, and his supervisor, Captain Giai, had attended the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He asked the Pentagon to find out whether there were any American officers who knew them. Word came back that Navy Lieutenant Lawrence Sharpe, currently helping to transport refugees from the North, had not only gone to school with Minh and Giai but had “housed them in his personal quarters at Fort Bragg.”5 Orders were immediately cut to send Sharpe to Saigon and assign him to the Saigon Military Mission.

  As soon as Sharpe showed up, Lansdale drove him to the radio station. They arrived to find a tank swiveling its gun at Lansdale’s Citroën. Undeterred, Lansdale banged on the radio-station door and demanded to see Lieutenant Minh. When Minh poked his head out, Lansdale told him, “I’ve got an old friend of yours here. Tell your goddamn tank to point his cannon some other direction so I can bring him in and we can talk to you.”6 Lansdale persuaded Minh to accept Sharpe as his “technical adviser,” and Sharpe worked behind the scenes to change the station’s message in stages. “Switch from character assassination of Diem,” Lansdale instructed him, “to attacking him for not taking action against Communist subversion in the south, and then again switch from that to a plain attack against the Communists for their subversive work.” It was a clever approach, even if Lansdale had to admit that it met with only “partial success.”7

  When Lansdale visited General Nguyen Van Hinh’s home for dinner, he found “a beehive of activity, staff officers shouting into telephones, motorcycle messengers coming and going, and several unit commanders poring over maps of the Saigon metropolitan area.”8 Hinh dropped hints that he had selected October 26, 1954, as the date for his uprising. Lansdale thought fast about how he could avert the coup. He announced that “an opportunity had come up to take Hinh and his staff officers for a brief visit to the Philippines.”9 Hinh said regretfully that he was too busy to join the trip, notwithstanding his fond memories of the fleshpots of Manila, but he agreed that his key lieutenants—Lieutenant Colonel Tranh Dinh Lan, Captain Pham Xuan Giai, and Lieutenant Nguyen Van Minh—could go. So on the evening of October 25, 1954, Lansdale found himself winging his way over the South China Sea in a C-47 transport aircraft along with the three Vietnamese officers.10 After a few days in Manila, Lansdale returned to Saigon to find that no coup had occurred. At the end of November, General Hinh finally agreed to step down and leave the country. He moved to France, where he eventually rose to become deputy chief of staff of the French air force.

  In his memoir, Lansdale claimed that Hinh had called off his coup because he “had forgotten that he needed his chief lieutenants for key roles in the coup and couldn’t proceed while they were out of the country with me.”11 That claim has been credulously repeated in most historical accounts, including the Pentagon Papers.12 It seems unlikely, however, that Hinh, who was far from a half-wit, could have “forgotten” something so important. Rather, the whole episode suggests that the general was not as serious about staging a mutiny as he pretended to be. “In retrospect,” the CIA’s official historian concludes, “General Hinh’s anti-Diem posturing looks like a French ploy to intimidate Diem into either cooperating or resigning, and Hinh’s departure for exile in Paris in November suggests French acknowledgement of failure.”13 The French held Hinh back from launching a coup in no small part because President Eisenhower threatened to cut off aid to South Vietnam if Diem were overthrown.14 But even if Lansdale’s ploy was not as pivotal as he later pretended, it was, along with his suborning of the radio station, nevertheless a good example of his subtle and indirect approach to dealing with the most difficult political problems.

  IN THE Philippines, Lansdale had had to fight a two-front war, not only against Communist insurgents but also against adversaries within the U.S. government. Vietnam was no different. But whereas in his earlier posting the retired admiral Raymond Spruance had been a staunch supporter, here Lansdale could not always count on the backing of the U.S. ambassador.

  Lansdale got along reasonably well with the “calm, low-key”15 Donald Heath—“a very likeable person,” he later said16—but Diem saw Heath as too pro-French, and he gave Lansdale a long message for transmittal to Washington asking that the ambassador be relieved. On October 18, 1954, Lansdale sent the cable straight to Allen Dulles, telling him that, in his own view, it would be “constructive [to] replace Heath soonest,” provided that his replacement was “out of the top drawer.”17 Dulles shared the message with his brother the secretary of state, and Heath was replaced shortly thereafter, suffering the same fate that had already befallen General Albert Pierson, the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group commander in the Philippines who had also run afoul of Lansdale at a time when he had the support of the powerful Dulles duo. But in this instance Lansdale’s scheming backfired, which may be why he omitted any mention of it in his memoir.

  President Eisenhower decided to replace Heath with General J. Lawton Collins, who had served under his command in Europe during World War II and later as deputy chief of staff when Ike was Army chief of staff. Subsequently, from 1949 to 1953, Collins had served as chief of staff in his own right, before becoming the U.S. representative to NATO’s Military Committee. On November 8, 1954, he arrived in Saigon with a small entourage of military aides. Lansdale scrambled to learn what he could about the new ambassador with the gray hair, steely eyes, boyish face, and Southern accent. A West Point graduate from a large Irish Catholic family in New Orleans, the fifty-eight-year-old Collins had compiled a sterling record in World War II. A mere major in 1940, he had risen by
1942 to become the two-star commander of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division, leading it into combat on Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands. The “Tropic Lightning” division’s lightning bolt insignia accounted for his nickname, Lightning Joe. One of the few U.S. generals to see action in both the Pacific and the European theaters, Collins led the breakout from Normandy after D-Day and won praise from General Omar Bradley as “one of the outstanding field commanders in Europe.”18

  Lightning Joe was renowned as a “GI’s general” who went wherever the fighting was the worst; in the Solomon Islands, he personally dueled with Japanese snipers.19 He was also a skilled battlefield orator who always knew the right words to inspire his men. However, like a long line of American generals culminating in William Westmoreland, he would turn out to be unsuited for the complexities and difficulties of Vietnam, where the threat did not come from enemy tanks rolling over the border. “Saigon,” a veteran American diplomat noted, “was a confused, chaotic political environment where yes often meant no and the best staff work in the world could become meaningless overnight.”20

  Lansdale would have cause to regret his role in Don Heath’s recall as soon as he attended the first “country team” meeting that Collins convened at the U.S. embassy, at 39 Hàm Nghi Boulevard, a triangular office building near the Saigon River that did not yet have the fortress-like aspect that newly built American embassies around the world would acquire in the years ahead. Under Heath, meetings of the senior staff had been “friendly gatherings with much open discussion,” Lansdale wrote. By contrast, Collins “insisted upon a more disciplined format, calling for brief oral reports from each member, after which we would all shut up and sit there while he told us what the situation really was like and what each of us was to do about it until the next weekly meeting. He was very much the boss, to whom we were to respond with a yes sir or a no sir, period.”21