by Max Boot
Lansdale would get his revenge at receptions by putting his arm around Carbonel’s shoulders and, in the most “grating American manner,” loudly exclaim, “This guy is my buddy. You treat him right, you hear?” This would make Carbonel “explode,” angrily shaking Lansdale’s arm off his shoulder.67
Lansdale suspected the French officers at TRIM of reporting about him to one of the French intelligence services. “Once in a while,” Lansdale said, these officers “would have the grace to blush when I came upon them as they were busy writing reports of my daily activities, presumably for a parent service.”68 Once-secret documents from the French archives reveal that their operatives watched his house and movements as well.69
Lansdale blamed the French for their strained relations, but he contributed to the tension with his own prejudice—as symbolized by his refusal to ever visit France. One of his team members, Joe Baker, was later puzzled why Lansdale had “such a great dislike or hatred of the French”70—an attitude not shared either by Baker or by Joe Redick, who said, “I liked the French that we worked with very much, except for maybe one or two who were very anti-American.”71 By contrast, Lansdale’s letters positively bristled with anti-French animus, a sentiment fully shared by his protégé Ngo Dinh Diem. “My facetious recommendation to the ambassador,” he wrote home, “was that we bring in American advisers throughout and pay the French to send all their advisors to Moscow where they can teach the Russians how to make a really complex bureaucracy.”72
Lansdale’s anti-French bias was prevalent among Americans in Vietnam. They thought they had little to learn from the French, who had failed to win their war against the Vietminh. Little did they suspect that they would soon repeat and even exceed most of their forerunners’ mistakes.
DESPITE THE mutual distrust among the South Vietnamese, French, and Americans, they were all supposed to work together to pull off the first big test of their nation-building prowess: Operation Liberty to reoccupy the Ca Mau Peninsula, jutting out into the South China Sea at the very tip of South Vietnam. It was due to be evacuated by the Vietminh in February 1955. When a group of French and American officers gathered for a briefing on the Ca Mau plans, the Vietnamese commander of the operation, Lieutenant Colonel Duong Van Duc, gave such an uninspired presentation that Iron Mike O’Daniel started asking some tough questions—until Lansdale pulled him aside and explained that Duc was not briefing the real plan. He was making one up on the spot because he was afraid that if he briefed the real operation the French would sabotage it.73
While the Vietnamese were willing to tell the Americans what they were up to, they were eager to run Operation Liberty all by themselves. It took all of Lansdale’s persuasive powers to win permission for two members of his staff, Lieutenant Rufus Phillips and Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Karrick, to observe the operation. The soft-spoken Karrick would supervise logistics from the Vietnamese army command post at Soc Trang, a town in the Mekong Delta just north of Ca Mau, while the good-natured Phillips, pretending to be a foreign reporter, would go in with the troops. At more than six feet tall and 220 pounds, with the build of the Yale defensive tackle he had once been (albeit at a time when linemen were not as jumbo-sized as they would subsequently become) and with a fair complexion, Rufe would cut a conspicuous figure among the shorter and darker Vietnamese, giving rise to a new nickname: le monstre aimable (the likeable monster).74 Also going along would be Colonel Joe Banzon, a Philippine army officer who was Ramon Magsaysay’s informal envoy to South Vietnam. While getting the South Vietnamese to accept even Phillips was a major struggle, Lightning Joe Collins was dismayed to hear that only one very junior officer was going on such an important mission. Why weren’t more senior advisers involved, he demanded? Iron Mike O’Daniel replied that Phillips was “one of Ed’s people.” Collins was satisfied. He probably thought that Phillips’s lowly rank was just a cover.75
Colonel Duc was as resistant to letting Filipino doctors and nurses accompany him as he was to American advisers, even though he had only one army doctor of his own—hardly sufficient for his own troops, much less for the civilians of Ca Mau. Lansdale overcame this obstacle by rounding up “several of the prettiest nurses” from Operation Brotherhood and flying out to meet Colonel Duc and his staff at their headquarters in Soc Trang. At lunch, he made sure that the best-looking Filipinas were seated next to Duc and his senior officers. “Lunch had hardly started,” Lansdale later wrote, “before the Vietnamese had decided that Philippine medical teams simply must accompany them into Camau.”76
Prior to the start of Operation Liberty, Rufe Phillips had launched a training program to teach the troops how to interact with the populace. A courteous driving class stressed “the importance of not alienating the population by killing their chickens or running people off the road,” with prizes for the best drivers. The psychological-warfare unit of the South Vietnamese army put on plays to hammer the point home for illiterate soldiers. In one version, Lansdale wrote, “the Good Soldier would pay the villagers for a chicken, while the Bad Soldier would steal one over the Villagers’ protests; afterward the Villagers would talk about the soldiers, with friendly words for the Good Soldier’s unit but with Villagers going to help the local guerrillas attack the other unit, the Bad Soldier’s unit.”77 The classes and plays were well received, but after one good-driving class, Phillips noted, the soldiers got right back into their trucks “and barreled off in various directions to their units, scattering chickens, pigs, and people right and left.” “A single lecture was not going to change ingrained habits.”78
The operation began on February 8, 1954. Phillips, wearing civilian clothes with a Beretta automatic concealed in the small of his back, rode along with Colonel Duc in his jeep. They made slow progress down a dilapidated dirt road zigzagged by Vietminh trenches designed to impede French army movements. They saw many banana, mango, and palm trees but few people. The inhabitants were hiding, because they had been warned by the Vietminh that they would be raped and robbed by the invading troops. Around noon, they reached Ca Mau Town, where they found ramshackle buildings still pockmarked with bullet holes. In the middle of the square was a monument to the brave fighters of the Vietminh; hardly anyone was visible.
The population’s wariness began to recede the next day when an Operation Brotherhood medical team set up shop with a sign out front: “Free Medical Clinic, All Are Welcome.” By midmorning, more than fifty people were waiting to be treated, and the doctors and nurses worked without stopping until nightfall. The troops also distributed blankets and mosquito nets and fixed roads and bridges. Psychological-warfare soldiers drove around with loudspeakers proclaiming, “We are different from the Vietminh who left you in poverty and disease. We will help you.”79 Before long, the people demonstrated their growing trust by alerting troops to secret arms caches and cadres left behind by the Vietminh.
A major failing, however, was that the troops did not penetrate the U Minh forest, notorious as both a Vietminh stronghold and a breeding ground for cerebral malaria and other deadly diseases. Lansdale figured that eventually the Vietminh would leave this uncongenial environment on their own. He was wrong; the forest would remain a Communist stronghold throughout America’s subsequent war in Vietnam.80 But, on the whole, Operation Liberty had gone as well as anyone could have expected—and with far less American involvement than in the years ahead.
THE NEXT major effort to reclaim an area from the Vietminh was Operation Giai Phong (Breaking Chains). It was focused on southern Quang Ngai and northern Binh Dinh Provinces in central Vietnam, an area twice as large as Ca Mau with a population of a million and a half people. The South Vietnamese commander here was Colonel Le Van Kim, who had been born in a village in Binh Dinh and was one of the few Vietnamese to graduate from the French General Staff College. To assist him, Lansdale had the Saigon Military Mission prepare an “after-action” report on the Ca Mau operation, along with a plan for Breaking Chains, both of which Kim was then allowed to present to the Viet
namese high command as his own handiwork. This was the kind of “under the table” help that Lansdale favored, so as to allow his local partners to gain “face.”81 All of Kim’s troops received a Lansdalian code of conduct printed on pocket-size cards. Its theme: “Every soldier a civic action agent.”
This operation began on April 22, 1954, and, like Operation Liberty, encountered no resistance—just wary villagers uncertain of what these heavily armed men were up to. Once again Rufe Phillips, who was winning Lansdale’s admiration as an “outstanding psychological warrior,”82 was the only foreign adviser allowed to go along, and once again Operation Brotherhood worked to win over the public with free medical care. Repeating the experience of Operation Liberty, as the people became used to the troops’ presence they began to point out hidden Vietminh weapons caches and to identify stay-behind Vietminh cadres.83 To discredit the Vietminh cadres as they were leaving, Lansdale sent word in the name of the Vietminh to the people of Binh Dinh, asking them to redeem their Vietminh currency for Bank of Indochina piastres at the Vietminh’s official evacuation point. “Thousands traveled to Qui Nhon,” Lansdale boasted, “where red-faced Vietminh lamely explained that they had no money.”84
Despite such coups, there was a fundamental problem common to both this operation and its predecessor: there was no capable and honest civilian governance team ready to come in and take over from the army once it departed. Lansdale had tried to address this deficiency by persuading Diem to create a Civic Action Commission under a dynamic former Vietminh officer named Kieu Cong Cung. He trained students who had arrived in the South as refugees from the North to don black pajamas and bring a semblance of governance to the villages in accord with a “Three Withs” mantra: “eat with, sleep with, and work with the people.” By October 1955, forty-six civic-action teams would be deployed in twenty-five provinces.85 Other efforts to train administrators were launched by a team from Michigan State University, led by Wesley Fishel and funded in part by the CIA.86 But even the best-trained administrators would be undermined by the corruption and lethargy of the Saigon government, the villagers’ xenophobic resistance to outsiders, and growing attacks from reconstituted Communist insurgents. The lack of effective civilian follow-up would render Lansdale’s 1955 pacification successes as transitory as the “surge” in Iraq from 2007 to 2008.
That problem was not, however, at first evident. Operation Breaking Chains appeared to be so successful that Lansdale urged Diem, who was normally loath to leave his palace, to travel to the scene to claim credit. The premier wanted Lansdale to go with him, but Lansdale refused—he did not want to be seen as the kingmaker. He urged Diem to take only a few French officials and correspondents.87
On the morning of May 26, 1955, Diem’s C-47 landed in a cloud of dust on a dirt airstrip outside Qui Nhon, the coastal city that was the capital of Binh Dinh Province. A large crowd of Vietnamese villagers “dressed in traditional black pajamas and conical hats” was waiting along with Colonel Kim and Lieutenant Rufus Phillips. Kim drove the prime minister into town in his open jeep, Diem standing and ceremoniously waving as if he were the Queen of England. The entire route was lined five and ten deep. Suddenly the jeep stopped and Diem plunged into the spectators. Phillips, who was in the next jeep, observed the crowd go wild: “all the traditional Vietnamese restraint was gone.” He was struck by the “remarkable response” Diem had received in an “area completely controlled by the Vietminh for nine years”—a reaction that was “too genuine and spontaneous” to have been “coerced.”88
Lansdale had done a virtuoso job of orchestrating the pacification program. But all of his initiatives would be for naught if Diem could not hold on to power in Saigon. Yet even as pacification was occurring in the countryside, the prime minister was being forced to battle for his survival in the capital. Lansdale cleverly had helped to defuse General Nguyen Van Hinh’s coup, but other plotters would not be so easily deterred. The resulting battles would offer the supreme test of Diem’s survival skills and Lansdale’s advisory skills.
16
The Viper’s Nest
There was a sudden madness that nearly tore Vietnam apart at the seams.
—EDWARD LANSDALE
“ONE man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Never has this hoary adage been more applicable than in the case of Trinh Minh Thé (pronounced tay), a warlord who was reviled by the French as a mass murderer and revered by many Vietnamese as a hero. Both sides could agree on one thing: he would play a paramount role in determining whether the Ngo Dinh Diem regime would live or die. In fact, the chief challenge to Diem’s rule in 1954–55 did not come from Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh at that point was too focused on consolidating his own authority in North Vietnam to actively challenge Diem’s nation-building aspirations. The primary obstacles were the three sects—the Cao Dai, the Hoa Hao, and the Binh Xuyen—which fielded their own armies. And no sect general was more prominent or mercurial than Trinh Minh Thé.
Trinh Minh Thé would become notorious in the English-speaking world following the publication in late 1955 of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. The novel features a series of terrorist explosions in Saigon that are blamed on Thé and indirectly on Alden Pyle, a naïve young CIA officer who is revealed to be helping him. In January 1952, there was, in fact, a series of bombings in Saigon. Thé, who hated the Communists and the colonialists with equal fervor, was responsible, but at that stage he did not have American support; the United States was still backing the French war effort. Norman Sherry, Greene’s biographer, quotes an unnamed CIA officer: “To my knowledge no single agency official was—at that time—in contact with Colonel Thé. And I would know.”1 Yet the French blamed the Americans for assisting in the killing of their countrymen, and it was from them that Greene picked up the story. The French already hated Thé for dispatching a grenade thrower who in 1951 had assassinated the French commander in Cochin China. Thus it is not surprising that when Lansdale became involved with Thé, French hostility toward him became venomous.
In real life rather than fiction, Lansdale’s relationship with Trinh Minh Thé began in September 1954, more than two and a half years after the Saigon terrorist bombings. At a time when Lansdale already was preoccupied heading off coups, undermining North Vietnam and moving refugees from the North, Diem asked him to take on another task: to persuade Thé to integrate his men into the national army. Unknown to Lansdale, Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu was carrying on his own negotiations to achieve the same result.2 But Lansdale, as the representative of the United States, had prestige and resources that Nhu could not match.
Thé was only thirty-two years old but already, in Lansdale’s words, a “legendary rebel guerrilla chief”3 who had been described by one correspondent as “the most charming cut-throat [he] had met.”4 Originally trained along with other Cao Dai militiamen by the Japanese during World War II, Thé had at first fought alongside the Vietminh before turning, along with the rest of the Cao Dai, against Ho Chi Minh. With French help, the Cao Dai formed a militia to protect themselves against Communist encroachments. Thé became its chief of staff. In 1951, however, he broke off from the mainstream Cao Dai and began to fight both the Vietminh and the French in the hope of creating an independent, non-Communist state. By 1954, he was in command of twenty-five hundred battle-hardened fighters operating out of Nui Ba Den (Black Virgin) Mountain, an extinct volcano more than three thousand feet high located sixty miles northeast of Saigon.
Ed Lansdale and Joe Redick set off in a car with several other teammates to find this mysterious warlord on September 15, 1954, wearing casual clothes as though out for a picnic, with guns carefully tucked away. They cruised down the highway past “lonely watch-towers and little roadside forts siting in the rice paddies” and then rattled along a “rutted dirt road” until they were surprised by a group of guerrillas who emerged silently from the jungle. In the lead, Lansdale noted, was a youth “no more than five feet tall and maybe weighing ninety pounds dripping wet. . .
. Wearing a faded khaki shirt and trousers, tennis shoes on his feet, weaponless, hatless, he looked as if he might be a guide sent to take me to his leader.” Lansdale was astonished to learn that “this wiry youngster was the villainous guerrilla hated by the French!”5
Lansdale and Redick hid their car in the jungle and hiked with Thé up the mountain. Eventually they reached a small shelter in the jungle that served as Thé’s headquarters. Their conversation required two translators—one of Thé’s aides translated from Vietnamese into French and Redick from French into English—supplemented by facial expressions and gestures. But then, Lansdale had found in the Philippines that even a complete absence of any common tongue did not impede his efforts to communicate with Negrito tribesmen. Lansdale found himself liking Thé “instinctively,” and Thé, in turn, took a liking to Lansdale. Lansdale stressed that Americans were dedicated to principles of liberty. “That’s what we fight for!” Thé replied. Lansdale urged him to join the South Vietnamese army. Thé said that this would be a good idea in principle, but there were too many “bad elements” in the army—too many “French officers” such as General Nguyen Van Hinh. He did promise to take care of Diem in case he was overthrown by Hinh and in principle confirmed his support for the Diem government. He also promised to release three French prisoners he was holding.6
