Elected president by a vast majority, Diem in 1956 issued Ordinance 57-A. Marketed by Lansdale as agrarian reform, it replaced the centuries-old custom of village self-government with councils appointed by district and province chiefs. Diem, of course, appointed the district chiefs, who appointed the village councils, which then employed local security forces to collect exorbitant rents for absentee landlords living the high life in Saigon. Universal displeasure was the response to Ordinance 57-A, the cancellation of the reunification elections, and the rigged election of 1955. Deprived of its chance to win legal representation, the Vietcong launched a campaign of its own, emphasizing social and economic awareness. Terror was not one of their tactics. Says Rand Corporation analyst J. J. Zasloff in “Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam 1954-1960”: “There is no evidence in our interviews that violence and sabotage were part of their assignment.” Rather, Communist cadres were told “to return to their home provinces and were instructed, it appears, to limit their activities to organizational and propaganda tasks.”17
However, on the basis of CIA reports saying otherwise, Diem initiated the notorious Denunciation of the Communists campaign in 1956. The campaign was managed by security committees, which were chaired by CIA-advised security officers who had authority to arrest, confiscate land from, and summarily execute Communists. In determining who was a Communist, the security committees used a three-part classification system: A for dangerous party members, B for less dangerous party members, and C for loyal citizens. As happened later in Phoenix, security chiefs used the threat of an A or B classification to extort from innocent civilians, while category A and B offenders—fed by their families—were put to work without pay building houses and offices for government officials.
The military, too, had broad powers to arrest and jail suspects while on sweeps in rural areas. Non-Communists who could not afford to pay “taxes” were jailed until their families came up with the cash. Communists fared worse. Vietminh flags were burned in public ceremonies, and portable guillotines were dragged from village to village and used on active and inactive Vietminh alike. In 1956 in the Central Highlands fourteen thousand people were arrested without evidence or trial—people were jailed simply for having visited a rebel district—and by year’s end there were an estimated twenty thousand political prisoners nationwide.18
In seeking to ensure his internal security through the denunciation campaign, Diem persecuted the Vietminh and alienated much of the rural population in the process. But “the most tragic error,” remarks Professor Huy, “was the liquidation of the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Binh Xuyen forces. By destroying them, Diem weakened the defense of South Vietnam against communism. In fact, the remnants … were obliged to join the Vietnamese Stalinists who were already reinforced by Diem’s anti-communist struggle campaign.
“Diem’s family dealt with this problem,” Huy goes on, “by a repressive policy applied through its secret service. This organ bore the very innocent name of the Political and Social Research Service. It was led by Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, a devoted Catholic, honest and efficient, who at the beginning sought only to establish a network of intelligence agents to be used against the communists. It had in fact obtained some results in this field. But soon it became a repressive tool to liquidate any opponent.”19
By then Ed Lansdale had served his purpose and was being unceremoniously rotated out of Vietnam, leaving behind the harried Civic Action program to his protégé, Rufus Phillips. Meanwhile, “Other Americans were working closely with the Vietnamese,” Lansdale writes, noting: “Some of the relationships led to a development which I believed could bring only eventual disaster to South Vietnam.
“This development was political,” Lansdale observes. “My first inkling came when several families appeared at my house one morning to tell me about the arrest at midnight of their men-folk, all of whom were political figures. The arrests had a strange aspect to them, having come when the city was asleep and being made by heavily armed men who were identified as ‘special police.’”20
Sensing the stupidity of such a program, Lansdale appealed to Ambassador George Reinhardt, suggesting that “Americans under his direction who were in regular liaison with Nhu, and who were advising the special branch of the police, would have to work harder at influencing the Vietnamese toward a more open and free political concept.” But, Lansdale was told, “a U.S. policy decision had been made. We Americans were to give what assistance we could to the building of a strong nationalistic party that would support Diem. Since Diem was now the elected president, he needed to have his own party.”21
“Shocked” that he had been excluded from such a critical policy decision, Lansdale, to his credit, tried to persuade Diem to disband the Can Lao. When that failed, he took his case to the Dulles brothers since they “had decisive voices in determining the US relationship with South Vietnam.” But self-described “visionary and idealist” Lansdale’s views were dismissed offhandedly by the pragmatic Dulleses in favor “of the one their political experts in Saigon had recommended.” Lansdale was told he should “disengage myself from any guidance to political parties in Vietnam.”22
The mask of democracy would be maintained. But the ideal was discarded in exchange for internal security.
CHAPTER 2
Internal Security
In 1954, in the professed belief that it ought to extend the “American way” abroad, Michigan State University (MSU) offered to provide the government of Vietnam with a huge technical assistance program in four areas: public information, public administration, finance and economics, and police and security services. The contract was approved in early 1955, shortly after the National Security Council (NSC) had endorsed Diem, and over the next seven years MSU’s Police Administration Division spent fifteen million dollars of U.S. taxpayers’ money building up the GVN’s internal security programs. In exchange for the lucrative contract, the Michigan State University Group (MSUG) became the vehicle through which the CIA secretly managed the South Vietnamese “special police.”
MSUG’s Police Administration Division contributed to Diem’s internal security primarily by reorganizing his police and security forces. First, Binh Xuyen gangsters in the Saigon police were replaced with “good cops” from the Sûreté. Next, recruits from the Sûreté were inducted into the Secret Service, Civil Guard, and Military Security Service (MSS), which was formed by Ed Lansdale in 1954 as “military coup insurance.” On administrative matters the MSS reported to the Directorate of Political Warfare in liaison with the CIA, while its operations staff reported to the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF)’s Joint General Staff in liaison with MAAG counterintelligence officers. All general directors of police and security services were military officers.
The Sûreté (plainclothesmen handling investigations, customs, immigration, and revenue) was renamed the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigations (VBI) and combined with the municipal police (uniformed police in twenty-two autonomous cities and Saigon) into a General Directorate of Police and Security Services within the Ministry of the Interior. This early attempt at bureaucratic streamlining was undermined by Diem, however, who kept the various police and security agencies spying on one another. Diem was especially wary of the VBI, which as the Sûreté had faithfully served the French and which, after 1954, under CIA management, was beyond his control. As a result, Diem judged the VBI by the extent to which it attacked his domestic foes, spied on the Military Security Service, and kept province chiefs in line.
Because it managed the central records depository, the VBI was the most powerful security force and received the lion’s share of American “technical” aid. While other services got rusty weapons, the VBI got riot guns, bulletproof vests, gas masks, lie detectors, a high-command school, a modern crime lab and modern interrogation centers; and the most promising VBI officers were trained by the CIA and FBI at the International Police Academy at Georgetown University in agent handling, criminal investigations, interrogation, and count
erinsurgency. The VBI (the Cong An to Vietnamese) is one of the two foundation stones of Phoenix.
Whereas the majority of Michigan State’s police advisers were former state troopers or big-city detectives, the men who advised the VBI and trained Diem’s Secret Service were CIA officers working under cover as professors in the Michigan State University Group. Each morning myopic MSUG employees watched from their quarters across the street as senior VBI adviser Raymond Babineau and his team went to work at the National Police Interrogation Center, which, Graham Greene writes in The Quiet American, “seemed to smell of urine and injustice.”1 Later in the day the MSUG contingent watched while truckloads of political prisoners—mostly old men, women, and children arrested the night before—were handcuffed and carted off to Con Son Prison. America’s first colonialists in Saigon looked, then looked away. For four years they dared not denounce the mass arrests or the fact that room P-40 in the Saigon Zoo was used as a morgue and torture chamber. No one wanted to incriminate himself or get on the wrong side of Babineau and his protégés in the “special police.”
The fear was palpable. In his book War Comes to Long An, Jeffrey Race quotes a province chief: “I hardly ever dared to look around in the office with all the Can Lao people there watching me, and in those days it was just impossible to resign—many others had tried—they were just led off in the middle of the night by Diem’s men dressed as VC, taken to P-40 or Poulo Condore [Con Son Prison] and never heard from again.”2
While the VBI existed primarily to suppress Diem’s domestic opponents, it also served the CIA by producing an annual Ban Tran Liet Viet Cong (Vietcong order of battle). Compiled for the most part from notes taken by secret agents infiltrated into VC meetings, then assembled by hand at the central records depository, the Ban Tran Liet was the CIA’s biography of the VCI and the basis of its anti-infrastructure operations until 1964.
In 1959 Diem held another sham election. Said one Vietnamese official quoted by Race: “The 1959 election was very dishonest. Information and Civic Action Cadre went around at noon when everyone was home napping and stuffed ballot boxes. If the results didn’t come out right they were adjusted at district headquarters.” When asked if anyone complained, the official replied, “Everyone was terrified of the government …. The Cong An beat people and used ‘the water treatment.’ But there was nothing anyone could do. Everyone was terrified.” Said another official: “During the Diem period the people here saw the government was no good at all. That is why 80% of them followed the VC. I was the village chief then, but I had to do what the government told me. If not, the secret police [VBI] would have me picked up and tortured me to death. Thus I was the very one who rigged the elections here.”3
As is apparent, Diem’s security forces terrorized the Vietnamese people more than the VCI. In fact, as Zasloff noted earlier, prior to 1959 the VCI carried out an official policy of nonviolence. “By adopting an almost entirely defensive role during this period,” Race explains, “and by allowing the government to be the first to employ violence, the Party—at great cost—allowed the government to pursue the conflict in increasingly violent terms, through its relentless reprisal against any opposition, its use of torture, and, particularly after May 1959, through the psychological impact in the rural areas of the proclamation of Law 10/59.”4
In Phoenix/Phung Hoang: A Study of Wartime Intelligence Management, CIA officer Ralph Johnson calls the 10/59 Law “the GVN’s most serious mistake.” Under its provisions, anyone convicted of “acts of sabotage” or “infringements on the national security” could be sentenced to death or life imprisonment with no appeal. Making matters worse, Johnson writes, was the fact that “The primary GVN targets were former Viet Minh guerrillas—many of whom were nationalists, not Communists—regardless of whether or not they were known to have been participating in subversive activities.”5
The 10/59 Law resulted in the jailing of fifty thousand political prisoners by year’s end. But rather than suppress the insurgency, Vietnamese from all walks of life joined the cause. Vietminh cadres moved into the villages from secluded base camps in the Central Highlands, the Rung Sat, the Ca Mau swamps, and the Plain of Reeds. And after four years of Diem style democracy, the rural population welcomed them with open arms.
The nonviolence policy practiced by Vietcong changed abruptly in 1959, when in response to the 10/59 Law and CIA intrusions into North Vietnam, the Lao Dong Central Committee organized the 559th Transportation and Support Group. Known as Doan 559, this combat-engineer corps carved out the Ho Chi Minh Trail through the rugged mountains and fever-ridden jungles of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Doan 559 paved the way for those Vietminh veterans who had gone North in 1954 and returned in 1959 to organize self-defense groups and political cells in Communist-controlled villages. By the end of 1959 Doan 559 had infiltrated forty-five hundred regroupees back into South Vietnam.
Sent to stop Doan 559 from infiltrating troops into South Vietnam were U.S. Army Special Forces commandos trained in “behind-the-lines” anti-guerrilla and intelligence-gathering operations. Working in twelve-member A teams under cover of Civic Action, the Green Berets organized paramilitary units in remote rural regions and SWAT team-type security forces in cities. In return, they were allowed to occupy strategic locations and influence political events in their host countries.
Developed as a way of fighting cost effective counterinsurgencies, the rough-and-tumble Green Berets were an adjunct of the CIA—which made them a threat to the U.S. Army. But Special Forces troopers on temporary duty (TDY) could go places where the Geneva Accords restricted the number of regular soldiers. For example, in Laos, the “Sneaky Petes” wore civilian clothes and worked in groups of two or three, turning Pathet Lao deserters into double agents who returned to their former units with electronic tracking devices, enabling the CIA to launch air attacks against them. Other double agents returned to their units to lead them into ambushes. As Ed Lansdale explains, once inside enemy ranks, “they could not only collect information for passing secretly to the government but also could work to induce the rank and file to surrender.” Volunteers for such “risky business,” Lansdale adds, were trained singly or in groups as large as companies that were “able to get close enough in their disguise for surprise combat, often hand to hand.”6
By the late 1950s, increasing numbers of American Special Forces were in South Vietnam, practicing the terrifying black art of psychological warfare.
Arriving in Saigon in the spring of 1959 as the CIA’s deputy chief of station was William Colby. An OSS veteran, Princeton graduate, liberal lawyer, and devout Catholic, Colby managed the station’s paramilitary operations against North Vietnam and the Vietcong. He also managed its political operations and oversaw deep-cover case officers like Air America executive Clyde Bauer, who brought to South Vietnam its Foreign Relations Council, Chamber of Commerce, and Lions’ Club, in Bauer’s words, “to create a strong civil base.”7 CIA officers under Colby’s direction funneled money to all political parties, including the Lao Dong, as a way of establishing long-range penetration agents who could monitor and manipulate political developments.
Under Colby’s direction, the CIA increased its advice and assistance to the GVN’s security forces, at the same time that MSUG ceased being a CIA cover. MSUG advisers ranging across South Vietnam, conducting studies and reporting on village life, had found themselves stumbling over secret policemen posing as village chiefs and CIA officers masquerading as anthropologists. And even though these ploys helped security forces catch those in the VCI, they also put the MSUG advisers squarely between Vietcong cross hairs.
So it was that while Raymond Babineau was on vacation, assistant MSUG project chief Robert Scigliano booted the VBI advisory unit out from under MSUG cover. The State Department quickly absorbed the CIA officers and placed them under the Agency for International Development’s Public Safety Division (AID/PSD), itself created by CIA officer Byron Engel in 1954 to provide “technical assistance”
and training to police and security officials in fifty-two countries. In Saigon in 1959, AID/PSD was managed by a former Los Angeles policeman, Frank Walton, and its field offices were directed by the CIA-managed Combined Studies Group, which funded cadres and hired advisers for the VBI, Civil Guard, and Municipal police. Through AID/PSD, technical assistance to police and security services increased exponentially. Introduced were a telecommunications center; a national police training center at Vung Tau; a rehabilitation system for defecting Communists which led to their voluntary service in CIA security programs; and an FBI-sponsored national identification registration program, which issued ID cards to all Vietnamese citizens over age fourteen as a means of identifying Communists, deserters, and fugitives.
Several other major changes occurred at this juncture. On the assumption that someday the Communists would be defeated, MSUG in 1957 had reduced the Civil Guard in strength and converted it into a national police constabulary, which served primarily as a security force for district and province chiefs (all of whom were military officers after 1959) and also guarded bridges, major roads, and power stations. CIA advisers assigned to the constabulary developed clandestine cells within its better units. Operating out of police barracks at night in civilian clothes, these ragtag Red Squads were targeted against the VCI, using intelligence provided by the VBI. However, in December 1960 the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group seized control of the constabulary and began organizing it into company, battalion, and regimental units armed with automatic rifles and machine guns. The constabulary was renamed the Regional Forces and placed under the Ministry of Defense. The remaining eighteen thousand rural policemen thereafter served to enforce curfews and maintain law and order in agrovilles—garrison communities consisting of forcefully relocated persons, developed by MSUG in 1959 in response to Ed Lansdale’s failed Civic Action program.
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