Mao gave his guest no warning that he was about to embark on his own challenge to US Pacific hegemony. He was quite explicit about the ‘social imperialist’ agenda: ‘a tense international situation could mobilize the population, could particularly mobilize the backward people, could mobilize the people in the middle, and could therefore promote the Great Leap Forward in economic construction’. In other words, Mao was going to incite Chinese chauvinism.3
On 23 August 1958 the People’s Liberation Army rained 30,000 artillery shells in one hour on the Kuomintang-controlled island of Jinmen (Quemoy) off the mainland, killing 600 of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. The US responded, as they were obliged to do under the 1954 defence treaty with Taiwan, with a massive naval build-up in the Taiwan Straits and the deployment of 200 aircraft. With the US threatening war, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko rushed to Beijing, where Mao explained that his intention was to lure the Americans into an ‘iron noose’. Gromyko was appalled when Mao amplified his strategy. If the Americans were to use nuclear weapons or invade China, the PLA would retreat into the interior, drawing US forces after them. At that point, the Kremlin should ‘use all means at its disposal’ to destroy them. Gromyko flatly told him that such support would not be forthcoming. His main object of having the Americans and Russians ‘dancing and scurrying’ about over two miserable little offshore islands achieved, Mao allowed tension to subside.
In view of Mao’s cavalier attitude towards nuclear warfare, it was not surprising that the Soviets found excuses not to give Communist China a prototype nuclear bomb and related blueprints as they had agreed to do in October 1957. Further tearing noises were heard, as we have seen, during the Sino–Indian conflict. In September 1958 Khrushchev arrived in Beijing for the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Chinese Revolution, to find no reception party at the airport and no microphone for his carefully prepared arrival speech. At the formal reception, he lectured his hosts on the need for a relaxation of international tensions, and chided them for the recklessness of their recent ventures in the Taiwan Straits and on the Sino-Indian border. The meetings between Chinese and Russians degenerated into insults, so the Russians cut short their scheduled week of talks and left. Shortly afterwards Moscow slashed aid to Beijing, which enabled Mao to blame the Soviet ‘revisionists’ for the failings of his Great Leap Forward. China increasingly regarded the Soviets as part of the problem rather than the solution, and themselves as the torchbearers of the insurgent Third World.
The CIA’s Sino–Soviet Studies Group, set up in 1956, produced a series of ‘Esau studies’, named after the biblical figure duped out of his birthright by his brother Jacob, which analysed the rift in the making. Agency analysts developed what amounted to heretical views at a time when the prevailing orthodoxy was of a monolithic Communist bloc pursuing common objectives. Those who stressed the role of national differences in Communist parties were accused of having ‘nineteenth-century minds’, to which they retorted that it was an improvement on having minds locked into the thirteenth century. Bureaucratic caution and suspicions that the split might itself be a ‘Commie plot’ explain why it took time for these views to feed into policy-making. Among those most sceptical were Eisenhower, Nixon and the CIA’s future chief John McCone.
It was not until 1960 that the views of the heretics found their way into the National Intelligence Estimates that the CIA prepared for the NSC, and not until about two years later that State Department officials accepted this new international reality.4 By early 1962, when 60,000 Muslim Uighars fled Xinjiang for neighbouring Kazakhstan, the Chinese accused Moscow of having suborned them through ‘subversive activities’. Moscow replied that since 1960 Chinese troops had flouted the borders, and warned of an ‘extremely decisive response’. This was where things were tending. What might have led to a shift in US foreign policy ten years before the Nixon–Kissinger opening to China in 1971–2 was put on hold because the Soviets and Chinese seemed to be co-operating in supporting North Vietnam’s war against the South. Despite the fact that Vietnamese national identity had been shaped by a thousand years of implacable resistance to the Chinese, the US saw Hanoi as just a proxy of Beijing, and the Vietnamese civil war as a replay of Korea.5
Why Vietnam?
As a senator, John Kennedy had repeatedly advertised his support for South Vietnam. It was, he said, in a flurry of mixed metaphors that we have already quoted, ‘the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike’.6 In his inaugural address JFK spoke grandiloquently of Americans as ‘watchmen on the walls of freedom’. An activist style swept through Washington, as the ‘best and the brightest’ moved into their new posts, many of them armchair tacticians and professorial warriors, over-fond of modish social-science modernization theory. For all their conceit about being new brooms, they were mental prisoners of the faith that appeasement had brought about the Second World War, and of the post-war belief in a domino theory that refused to recognize the nationalist fissures in supposedly monolithic international Communism.
A few sceptics reported, from the inside, that much of the administration’s relentless activism was pointless. ‘We are like the Harlem Globetrotters, passing forward, behind, sidewise, and underneath. But nobody has made a basket yet,’ wrote the new National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy at the time. Bundy had been brought in from Harvard, where he was a senior academic manager.7 Although there was an emphasis on youth, a kitchen crowded with young chefs had to accommodate such oldies as Acheson, Averell Harriman and even Douglas MacArthur, for a huge range of advice was solicited, often to no obvious purpose.
Wider events favoured doing something about Vietnam. In their pre-inaugural briefing sessions Eisenhower had underscored the importance of Laos, which JFK insisted on pronouncing Lay-os to avoid the homonym with Louse. He initiated negotiations that included the Pathet Lao over the future of Laos, but until July 1962 Harriman’s diplomatic efforts in Geneva proved sterile. In any case the principal conflict was in South Vietnam, where the National Liberation Front (Viet Minh) swelled with southerners returning from training in the North from 10,000 guerrillas in January 1961 to 17,000 by October. It was not essential to make a stand in South Vietnam even if the assumptions about monolithic Communist aggression and falling dominoes were right. The line might as easily have been drawn around SEATO ally Thailand.8
As part of his creed of flexible response, JFK preferred to fight the war indirectly. The US Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) in Saigon received 500 extra personnel, the US having long exceeded the 685 permitted under the 1954 Geneva Accords.9 Four hundred freshly minted Special Forces operators in their green berets were sent to train the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) to conduct hit-and-run raids across the 17th parallel dividing North from South.
The CIA accelerated covert operations in Laos. Using such codenames as Operation Momentum, CIA officers organized and trained 9,000 Hmong tribesmen, whom the Americans ignorantly called Meo, which meant something like ‘native’ or ‘nigger’ in Chinese. The aim was to use the fiercely anti-Vietnamese tribesmen to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was becoming the major Viet Minh supply route, snaking along the border inside Laos. Supplies were flown into remote jungle landing strips by such colourful Air America pilots as ‘Weird Neil’ Houston, while the base chief, Tony Po, lived in a house adorned with strings of ears the Hmong had separated from severed Pathet Lao and Viet Minh heads.10
While these limited measures bought time, they did not address how the US might respond if the Diem regime collapsed. Some hawkish members of the administration – such as the Deputy Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Walt Rostow – wanted air and naval operations against North Vietnam, accompanied if necessary by US boots on the ground in the South. An ambitious Polish-Jewish academic from MIT, Rostow had been a target identifier in the Second World War. His enthusiasm for bombing led to his being known as ‘A
ir Marshal Rostow’. A major obstacle to boosting the US presence was President Diem himself, described as ‘a weak, third-rate Catholic bigot’ by one senior State Department official. While Diem wanted the cornucopia of US aid to continue, he was wily enough to realize that an overt US military presence – involving an autonomous command – would unify his many domestic opponents and give the Communists a powerful propaganda lever against him.
A major difficulty the new administration faced was getting an accurate picture of conditions in Vietnam, on which to build costly nation-building projects – manufactured from turgid sociology and a false analogy with civil engineering. That was why so many high-powered visitors were regularly sent there, for what in reality amounted to guided tours around Potemkin villages. On 5 May 1961 JFK sent Vice President Lyndon Johnson on a tour of Asia, with a key stop in Saigon. As his huge motorcade struggled into the capital Johnson stepped out to dispense pens, lighters and complimentary passes to the US Senate gallery, as he would have in Texas. In public he referred to Diem as ‘the Winston Churchill of Asia’. In private conversations, this master of innumerable ‘knee to knee’ negotiations in the US Senate, where he had been majority leader, found Diem impossible to pin down. ‘He was tickled as hell when I promised him forty million dollars and talked about military aid, but he turned deaf and dumb every time I talked about him speeding up and beefing up some health and welfare projects.’
Reporting to JFK on return from his tour, Johnson stressed that the free nations of Asia took a poor view of the search for a Laotian compromise. Diem himself was badly shaken by US willingness to negotiate with the Pathet Lao. Johnson added that support for Diem ‘must be made with the knowledge that at some point we may be faced with the further decision of whether we commit major United States forces . . . I recommend we proceed with a clear cut and strong program of action.’11 Yet Johnson also conjured up the spectre of US troops ‘bogged down chasing irregulars and guerrillas over the rice fields and jungles of Southeast Asia while our principal enemies China and the Soviet Union stand outside the fray and husband their strength’. This encapsulated the essential problem: JFK could neither withdraw nor escalate.12
Subsequent policy discussions were interminable and fractious. Many experts on Europe regarded the entire South-east Asian region as a bad joke, including doves like George Ball and the hawk Dean Acheson. Civilian and military hawks alike saw a massive Soviet and Chinese threat to the whole of South-east Asia, and wanted to deter it through escalating US responses to a series of pre-calibrated trip wires. Rostow recommended ground troops in Laos and air strikes against North Vietnam in retaliation for increased Viet Minh activity. JFK even consulted old MacArthur, who warned that Americans were useless at guerrilla warfare and should avoid it. America’s SEATO allies were unenthusiastic about intervention in South-east Asia, and only Thailand would be of much help on the ground. What did Pakistan or the Philippines care about Vietnam?
On 17 October Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor were despatched to Saigon to report, once again, on conditions on the ground and the durability of Diem’s regime. Maxwell Taylor spoke French and was known to liberals as the ‘good’ General, perhaps because he had recently headed the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The two men landed during the worst floods in living memory, with much of the Mekong Delta under water and many of the inhabitants stranded on their roofs. The Viet Cong abducted and murdered a prominent army liaison officer just to remind the arriving American who was really boss.
South Vietnam seemed to Taylor to be undergoing ‘a collapse of national morale’. Hidden in a cloud of cigarette smoke, Diem talked at Taylor for over four hours, although Taylor was fortunate here since Diem could often manage ten hours when he got into his stride. He insisted on more US aid while denying his visitors the ability to form their own opinion about what was needed. He also wanted extra US advisers to train a further 100,000 troops. When Taylor met General Duong Van Minh, who as ‘Big Minh’ notionally commanded the field army, Minh bitterly criticized Diem for permitting arrangements in which political concerns subverted the army chain of command. Thus Diem loyalist General Nguyen Khanh seemed to have more power than Lieutenant-General Le Van Ty, the Chief of the Joint General Staff, while civilian political bosses gave orders to the troops in their areas. There seemed to be seven intelligence agencies, none of them doing much to defeat the Viet Cong.
In the end, Taylor decided that it was the best of a series of bad options to stick with Diem. Fatefully, he recommended using the floods as an excuse to introduce a small number of US troops, notionally to lend Diem’s forces logistical support, but also to lay the foundations for whatever larger US presence might eventually be judged necessary.13
Intelligence experts warned that for each added US contribution, the Communists would respond in kind. They were ignored. There was no discussion of the implications of the Sino–Soviet split, nor of how North Vietnamese support for southern revolutionaries related to Moscow and Beijing, nor of international law on countering aggression of the kind that had justified the UN-mandated US intervention in Korea. Moreover, although the visiting Americans could not fail to comment on Diem’s deficiencies, which State Department officials tirelessly emphasized, they never addressed one crucial dilemma: if the US took over running the war it would be vilified around the world for neo-colonialism; if it merely continued to advise Diem, there was the dangerous prospect of the tail wagging the dog, or at least a fruitless cycle of mutual deception and manipulation.14
While the administration procrastinated about ends, the US ‘advisory’ presence mushroomed. The Saigon CIA station under William Colby from 1959 until 1961 – when he took over the Far Eastern Affairs desk – and his successor John Richardson became a huge operation, with housing, facilities and pay deeply resented by the embassy staff. When Richardson and his wife Ethyl took up residence in a big villa on a leafy street, they found that they could not hire servants. With that attention to local nuance so representative of American officials abroad, they had not appreciated that the house had been used as an interrogation centre by the French army, by their Japanese successors and then by the Viet Minh before the French Sûreté policemen returned. Vietnamese thought the place haunted, and would not enter it until monks were brought in to exorcize the house for a week, while the walls were hung with ghost-unfriendly mirrors.
Although the new wave of CIA officers likewise wished to exorcize the residual spirit of the ‘cowboy’ Lansdale, the Saigon station took over many of his best operatives, whose names would recur again and again in the history of Vietnam. One of Colby’s more lamentable schemes was the Lansdale-esque Project Tiger, involving the air or sea insertion of agents into North Vietnam, of whom the only ones to escape execution were those who had been turned, replicating the success of British counter-intelligence against the Germans in the Second World War.15
Nor were the soldiers idle. Under Project Beefup, the number of military advisers rose from 3,205 in December 1961 to 9,000 a year later. MAAG was transformed into a new Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) under General Paul Harkins and its role expanded to piloting aircraft and helicopters on combat missions, with some token South Vietnamese aviator present should anything go wrong or a plane be shot down by the Viet Minh. JFK also authorized the use of defoliants to deny the enemy forest cover, and herbicides to kill off their food crops.
Questioned by the press, JFK denied that the advisers were engaged in combat, even though some were being decorated for valour and others killed in action. He also tried to exercise control over a Saigon press corps that had once largely supported the American engagement but was becoming radically disillusioned by what they heard and saw on the ground. On one occasion JFK personally telephoned the publisher of the New York Times to get a foreign correspondent removed.
Illusion and Reality
The Kennedy administration was captive to the doctrine of sub-nuclear ‘flexible respon
se’. Counter-insurgency operations were only one item in the tool kit. It also included tactical good deeds of a progressive nature, what nowadays is called ‘nation-building’. JFK was sympathetic to hearts-and-minds warfare, involving quarantining the population from the Viet Cong so as ‘to put a TV in every thatched hut’, while the army pursued and killed the enemy lurking in between. Senior military commanders appreciated that this flexible response might boost their budgets, but were fundamentally wedded to more conventional forms of warfare based on eliminating the enemy with main force, or as they had it: ‘Grab ’em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.’16
As it happened this was the view being pushed in Saigon by Sir Robert Thompson, veteran of the Malayan Emergency, whom Diem had consulted to reduce his dependence on the Americans. Thompson’s British Advisory Mission (BRIAM), established in September 1961, proposed a plan to clear the Viet Cong from the Mekong Delta and to secure the population through the creation of ‘strategic hamlets’. Thompson’s memoirs are filled with lazy patronizing comments about both the Americans and the Vietnamese. The American reputation for efficiency was ‘mythical’; ‘no American we met had read Mao’. Actually, some of them had, in the original, for Thompson overlooked those thousands of American missionaries whose cosmopolitan children had grown up speaking Mandarin.17 In his view Vietnam was just Malaya on a bigger scale, for he had no grasp of what made the Viet Cong a very different fighting proposition from the Communists in Malaya. He failed to notice that some of the Americans knew a great deal about what had happened in Malaya, particularly the US foreign service officer Charles Cross and the sinologist Lucian Pye, author of Guerrilla Communism in Malaya (1956), which was based on interviews with captured Communists.18
Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 Page 55
