The Road Not Taken

by Max Boot

  The blue-chip Draper Committee concluded its work with a recommendation that U.S. foreign military aid, then at $1.6 billion, be boosted by another $400 million. President Eisenhower supported this recommendation in principle but held off in practice for fear of blowing a hole in the budget.74 The canny president’s real goal in appointing the committee had been to make the case to Congress and the public for why foreign aid, never popular to begin with and now under heavy attack after the publication of The Ugly American, was in the country’s interest. That the committee had done.

  THE TRIP with the Anderson subcommittee reminded Edward Lansdale of what he viewed as his true calling. Although he had grown exhausted in Vietnam by the end of 1956, now, after more than two years in Washington and a short visit to Saigon, he was eager to return. His brief reunion with Pat Kelly further reminded him of how much he was missing on a personal level while living in Washington. But the trip had also revealed how difficult it would be to get a return ticket to South Vietnam. If State Department officials were wary of Lansdale’s spending three days in Cambodia, how much more resistant would they be to letting him spend a longer period in Vietnam? Overriding their objections would be all the harder now that one of Lansdale’s primary patrons was no longer around: suffering from colon cancer whose spread could not be arrested by radiation therapy, John Foster Dulles resigned as secretary of state on April 15, 1959, and died in his sleep the following month at Walter Reed Army Hospital.

  A few weeks after returning home from his Asia swing in the spring of 1959, Ed wrote to Pat, “I’m fighting all the brass to get on back to Asia again. . . . I’ll outflank them yet—because that last visit showed me how very much I have been missing in my life.”75 Lansdale would learn that outflanking the bureaucracy was not easy to do, even if the case for his presence in Vietnam was becoming ever more urgent.

  20

  A New War Begins

  In a people’s war, you never make war against your own people.

  —EDWARD LANSDALE

  THE Vietnamese Workers’ Party, as the Communist Party was known, always had a collective leadership. But some leaders were more equal than others. The First Vietnam War—the French war—had been largely directed by Ho Chi Minh in consultation with Vo Nguyen Giap and, after 1949, Chinese advisers. But by the late 1950s, “Uncle Ho” was in his late sixties and was increasingly being pushed by his Politburo colleagues into a largely symbolic role. The Second Vietnam War—the American war—would be instigated and directed primarily by his ruthless and single-minded successor as secretary general: Le Duan. Of diminutive stature, with “perennially sad eyes and protruding ears,”1 Le Duan did not project the warmth and charisma of Ho Chi Minh or the intellectual sophistication of Vo Nguyen Giap. In political maneuvering, however, he would turn out to be their superior.

  Le Duan came from Quang Tri Province, just below the DMZ. No urbane intellectual like so many of his senior party comrades, Le Van Nhuan (his real name) was the son of a carpenter who had gone to work after high school as a railway attendant. One of the founding members of the Indochinese Communist Party, Le Duan was locked up as a political prisoner by French authorities in a series of brutal colonial gulags from 1931 to 1936 and again from 1940 to 1945. Like countless prisoners, from Michael Collins, Joseph Stalin, and Fidel Castro to Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, he left prison more militant than he arrived—and better educated in revolutionary methods. After war broke out against the French, Le Duan rose to a dominant position among Vietminh cadres in southern Vietnam.

  Already married but separated from his wife and family, who remained in the North, Le Duan fell in love with another woman while he was in the South—a party comrade named Nguyen Thuy Nga. He met her when she was assigned to bring him his breakfast, a relatively sumptuous meal of rice congee and two boiled eggs. He offered to share one of his eggs with her, and soon took her as his wife, even though he was not divorced. This would cause him considerable personal difficulties, for his first wife and children refused to acknowledge his second family, and the party forbade taking more than one wife. But as a member of the Politburo from 1951 on, he was, as Lien-Hang T. Nguyen makes clear in her groundbreaking narrative, Hanoi’s War, effectively above the law.

  Le Duan refused to go north along with other cadres after the Geneva Accords, preferring to stay behind in the South to organize a covert Communist network. He did not return to Hanoi until 1957, and then in 1958 he undertook another secret trip to the South to assess conditions there. He found rising discontent among southern cadres about Ngo Dinh Diem’s repressive policies. Le Duan returned to Hanoi determined to wage war on Saigon—a stance that placed him at odds with more cautious leaders such as Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, who favored building communism in the North first. After a heated debate, Le Duan and the “South first” faction won the argument in January 1959 at the Fifteenth Plenary Session of the Party Central Committee, which approved a resolution “to liberate South Vietnam from the yoke of oppression imposed by the imperialists and the feudalists.”2

  To implement the party’s decision, the People’s Army of Vietnam began training a new unit, the 338th Division, composed of “Southern regroupees,” that is, cadres who had gone north after the Geneva Accords and who would now be sent back to infiltrate the South. In contrast to American soldiers, who were, to Lansdale’s consternation, trained only in technical tasks, these future guerrillas were schooled first and foremost in politics. As the French journalist and novelist Jean Larteguy was to note, Hanoi had “created a remarkable type of army, a total army, in which every soldier is at one and the same time a propagandist, a schoolmaster, and a policeman, every officer an administrator, a priest, and an agronomist.”3 In the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies, by contrast, soldiers were simply soldiers.

  Alongside the 338th Division, another new military unit was activated: Military Transportation Group 559. Its duty was to create a covert supply route to move weapons and fighters south, expanding trails that had been used by the Vietminh during the French Indochina War. Initially its men traveled on foot and by bicycle; eventually roads would be hacked through the jungle big enough to accommodate trucks. By the end of 1959, 543 cadres and soldiers had been smuggled into South Vietnam along with “1,667 infantry weapons, 788 knives, 188 kilograms of explosives, and a number of military maps, compasses, and binoculars.”4 It was a modest start to a supply route, snaking through the jungles of Cambodia and Laos to penetrate deep into South Vietnam, that would later become legendary as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  At the end of 1960, Hanoi created the Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam to wage war in the South, along with the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) to serve as an umbrella organization for opposition political parties. The NLF was designed to foster the illusion that the war breaking out was a spontaneous, non-Communist uprising against the hated My-Diem (American-Diem) regime and its “lackey ruling clique of U.S. imperialists.”5 In reality, the NLF was as wholly controlled by the Communist Party as its predecessor, the Vietminh, had been. All of the insurgents soon became known generically as the Vietcong (Vietnamese Communists)—a pejorative label coined in Saigon that represented one of the few propaganda victories won by South Vietnam and its American allies in this new war.

  Later, the people of Vietnam would look back on the years from 1954 to 1960 as a golden age. “The six years of peace,” they would call it.6 Now the interlude between wars was over and a new struggle was beginning, one that would eclipse the French Indochina War in its inhumanity.

  NGO DINH DIEM responded to the Communist threat in the summer of 1959 with a new program to move residents of the Mekong Delta out of their isolated villages into “agricultural towns,” eventually known as agrovilles, where they would be provided with amenities such as electricity, markets, clinics, schools—and, above all, security. This was not, at least in theory, a bad idea: similar population resettlement plans had been implemented in campaigns aga
inst guerrillas from turn-of-the-century South Africa and the Philippines to, more recently, Malaya and Algeria. But the implementation of the agroville plan was badly flubbed. Local government officials coerced peasants into building the new settlements for no pay, and then coerced them again to move their families there. As the agrovilles’ unpopularity became clear, Diem throttled back ambitious expansion plans. While his initial goal had been to resettle half a million farmers, the actual number never exceeded fifty thousand.7

  Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with Diem was rising in the South. On April 19, 1960, a group of eighteen political figures from opposition parties gathered in the Caravelle Hotel, the newest and most luxurious hostelry in Saigon, to produce a manifesto denouncing the lack of freedom: “You should, Mr. President, liberalize the regime, promote democracy, guarantee minimum civil rights, recognize the opposition so as to permit the citizens to express themselves without fear, thus removing grievances and resentments.” The apparent arrogance with which Diem dismissed their concerns further contributed to the image of an increasingly autocratic and out-of-touch leader, especially among U.S. diplomats who were in close contact with the Caravelle group.8

  Harder to ignore, even for Diem, were the events of November 11, 1960. The CIA station chief in Saigon, William E. Colby, was awakened at his house around three o’clock in the morning by a “series of sharp noises.” It was not “the usual thunderstorms.” Rather, it was the sound of tracer bullets arcing across the night sky and thudding into his house.9 The bullets were meant not for him but for President Diem, who lived nearby. This was the beginning of what became known as the paratroopers’ coup. A tense standoff ensued between the mutinous airborne units and the presidential guard. To gain time, Diem entered into negotiations with the coup plotters while secretly radioing for help from army units based in the Mekong Delta. By the following day, November 12, armor and infantry units loyal to the president had streamed into the capital to surround the paratroopers. The rebellious troops surrendered and their leaders fled the country.

  The failed coup exacerbated tensions between Diem and the U.S. government. The U.S. ambassador, a “combative and peppery”10 career diplomat with the ambassadorial-sounding name of Elbridge Durbrow, had alienated Diem in various ways since his arrival in 1957. In September 1960, Durbrow had demanded that Diem make drastic changes in the government, including shipping his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, abroad as an ambassador, removing his trusted intelligence chief, adding opposition politicians to the cabinet, forcing all officeholders to publicly declare their finances, and lifting restrictions on the press. Even Durbrow had to concede that “some measures I am recommending are drastic and would be most impolitic for an ambassador to make under normal circumstances. But,” he insisted, “conditions here are by no means normal. Diem government is in quite serious danger.”11

  Two months later, when Diem’s presidency and even his life were in danger during the paratroopers’ coup, Durbrow adopted a neutral tone. The only U.S. interest, the upper-class diplomat lectured the president and the paratroopers, was in fostering unity against the Communists and preventing further bloodshed. Beyond that, they were welcome to settle their differences among themselves.12 This was a long way removed from the kind of wholehearted assistance that Lansdale had given to Diem. Durbrow’s “no bloodshed” mantra, was, in fact, the same one that Diem had heard from Lightning Joe Collins during the sect uprising in 1955, and it convinced him that the U.S. embassy was once again conniving in his overthrow.

  From the Pentagon, Edward Lansdale protested, “The actions of the U.S. ambassador undoubtedly have deepened President Diem’s suspicions of his motivations.”13 Lansdale was no fan of the devious Ngo Dinh Nhu, but he was skeptical of Durbrow’s proposal “to transfer Mr. and Mrs. Nhu” out of the country. This “involves the traumatic surgery of removing President Diem’s ‘right arm’ . . . ,” he wrote. “What is proposed as a substitute?. . . Would an American be used to fill this vacancy, partially? . . . Would another brother be used to fill the vacancy? . . . Would someone outside the family move in?”14 There was, of course, no substitute proposed—only a series of nonnegotiable demands.

  That Durbrow and Lansdale would advocate such different policies was hardly surprising. Although both were Californians, “Durbie,” as his friends called him, came from a privileged milieu in San Francisco far removed from Lansdale’s middle-class background in Los Angeles. His family’s largesse had made it possible for him to attend an almost comically long list of elite educational institutions, beginning with undergraduate studies at Yale, followed by graduate work at Stanford, the University of Dijon, The Hague Academy of International Law, Sciences Po in Paris, and the University of Chicago,15 before joining the Foreign Service, another elite institution dominated in those days by WASPs from “good” families. While working at the State Department during World War II, he had been instrumental in burying evidence that Hitler was carrying out a genocide against the Jews—a subject that he believed had nothing to do with “American interests,” properly understood.16 Having previously served only in Europe, Durbrow had scant patience with the difficulties of running a government in a newly independent Third World country while under incessant insurgent assault.

  Ngo Dinh Diem had had his differences with Lansdale in 1956 when the “Ugly American” had urged him to create a more democratic political system, but he also knew that Lansdale was one of the few friends he possessed in Washington. Whether to counter Ambassador Durbrow’s hostility or simply to provide guidance in difficult times, Diem officially requested in April 1960 that the Eisenhower administration send Lansdale back to Saigon to help deal “with intensified Communist guerrilla activity.”17 Lansdale professed himself to be “damn tired and worn out,” but his reaction was that “if Diem really wants me, I’ll come.”18

  By now Lansdale was a brigadier general.19 His first star, even more than his National Security Medal and Distinguished Service Medal, was a welcome validation of his efforts to fight the Cold War in Asia. That he was being promoted within the Air Force was all the more remarkable given how little he had to do with its operations. As neither a pilot nor a navigator nor even a conventional public affairs officer or intelligence officer, he was one of the more unlikely generals in the history of the aerial service—or any other military service, for that matter. Lansdale would later write, “It takes a Service mighty big of spirit to care for a bastard child—and this bastard child returns the affection.”20

  Yet Lansdale found that his new rank did not lessen internal opposition to sending him back to Vietnam. His proposed trip would become the subject of months of behind-the-scenes acrimony between the State and Defense Departments, with the diplomats complaining that “it was extremely difficult for Lansdale to work on a team.”21 The State Department finally relented when it realized that it could not move Diem with blunt-force methods. On November 27, 1960, Durbrow conceded, through gritted teeth, that a “Lansdale visit may be useful . . . if he follows Department’s instructions and cooperates fully and openly with me, including reporting accurately to me on talks with and advice given Diem and other top Vietnamese.”22 Admiral Harry Felt, commander in chief Pacific Command, also backed a Lansdale visit but lectured him that he was only to further “the objectives” that had already been agreed to by the Departments of State and Defense.23 He was forbidden to exercise his independent judgment and initiative.

  Lansdale had no choice but to accept these straitened conditions. “While I resent being treated as a second-class citizen, I think it wise to get on out there,” he wrote to Hanging Sam Williams, who had retired from the Army. “Diem and the Vietnamese need a friend present right now.”24

  LANSDALE LEFT Washington on December 29, 1960, at the end of a fraught year during which an ill-fated American U-2 spy plane had been shot down over the Soviet Union and the truculent Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had banged his shoe to make a point at the United Nations. His itinerary took him on “s
mooth as cream” Pan Am flights to Saigon via stops in San Francisco, Honolulu, Tokyo, and Manila. Along the way he picked up his trusty translator Joe Redick, who was again lent to him by the CIA, this time from his post in Laos. The layover in Manila was only about an hour, but many of his old friends, including Johnny Orendain, Manual Manahan, Oscar Arellano, and, of course, Pat Kelly, heard that he was on Philippine soil for the first time since 1959 and flocked to the airport to meet him. (Although he denied it, Lansdale probably tipped them off himself.) Some friends in the Philippine customs service even allowed Lansdale to leave the transit area and have coffee with his visitors in an airport office.

  “That hour in the airport was a darn frustrating thing to everyone,” Pat wrote to Ed a few weeks later. She had thought of following him to Saigon, “but I sobered up in time with the thought that it had been a couple of years since I had seen you, with only a note or two in between.” In truth, as subsequent events were to show, she remained very much in love with this married man. “If you ever come this way again, don’t time it with our election year, so there won’t be too much fuss about your staying overnight,” she implored him, “though I suppose there will always be much-ado about you.”25

  Any hopes that Lansdale might have had of keeping his brief stopover in Manila private were lost because a fellow passenger aboard the flight was the publisher of the Manila Bulletin. The next day, the newspaper ran a fanciful story beginning, “United States intelligence man Edward Lansdale, a former ranking official at the American embassy here, slipped quietly into town yesterday on a secret mission which apparently has something to do with the uneasy situation in the strife-torn Laos.”26 This article was picked up in other newspapers around the region, getting “the boy diplomats highly exercised,”27 in Lansdale’s phrase. Already the other U.S. ambassadors in the region, fearing his insubordinate tendencies and his reputation for “dirty tricks,” had demanded that he stay out of their countries, and this incident seemed to confirm their concerns. Ambassador William C. Trimble in Phnom Penh wrote to Washington, “Department will recall this treatment of Lansdale’s trip was predicted (reference telegram). Under present circumstances feel impelled urge once again in strongest terms that Lansdale not visit Cambodia.”28