Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

There were actually few meaningful lessons to be drawn from Malaya, where the Communist insurgents were ethnic Chinese and the majority population Malay. Furthermore it had taken the British twelve years to get on top of them, in circumstances infinitely more propitious than those prevailing in South Vietnam. One narrow land border between Malaya and Thailand was not comparable with the 800-mile internal frontier of dense jungle, rivers and mountains between Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The British had a functioning administration throughout Malaya; in Vietnam a similar set-up had vanished with the French. Vietnam had an abundance of rice, Malaya did not, which enabled the British to use food supplies as a means of population control. Finally the common threat from Indonesia concentrated both Malay and Chinese minds to accept a federal settlement once the British had promised independence.

  Despite these differences, Diem simply rechristened his earlier agrovilles ‘strategic hamlets’ and called for increased aid, which was forthcoming because of the Malayan precedent. By September 1962 some 4,322,034 people (33.4 per cent of the population) were gathered in 2,800 strategic hamlets, corralled within moats and bristling bamboo spikes. The Americans dubbed them ‘oil spots’, the coalescence of which would exclude the Viet Cong from operating in a given area. While they marvelled at the speed with which all this was done, the Americans were unaware that the official driving the programme so fast, Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, was a highly placed Viet Minh agent, whose aim was to encourage peasant disaffection. He certainly succeeded.19

  The problem was that the oil spots were widely dispersed, while the strategic hamlets took little or no notice of how peasants related to ancestral graves or worked their patchwork fields. All intervening areas were declared free-fire zones in which anything that moved could be pulverized with artillery and bombing. While US officials saw the strategic hamlets as an opportunity to introduce modernizing reforms in village life, Diem regarded them primarily as a means of political control. Aid money was now embezzled by an even larger number of corrupt officials, in a country where the pool of educated administrators was modest to begin with. The CIA also spread vast sums of money around, so much that they got the Vietnamese to sign for the few available trolleys the bulky cash was moved on rather than for the cash itself. By contrast, where they were in control, which meant much of the country after dark, the Viet Minh were scrupulously egalitarian, combining this with the systematic assassination of corrupt government officials.20

  The delusion that these programmes were having an effect confirmed JFK’s reluctance to bring the big military club to bear. By the summer of 1962 he was contemplating withdrawing US advisers, starting the following year. One hears echoes of his doubts and dilemmas amid the beating of the war drums around him. For all the specious numerology, he knew that one basic set of figures did not compute. How could he justify sending US combat troops to fight 10,000 miles away, in what seemed a lopsided conflict involving 16,000 guerrillas and an indigenous South Vietnamese army which on paper numbered 200,000? As he astutely remarked: ‘The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer. And in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.’21

  But at the same time JFK’s defining fear of seeming soft on Communism prevented him from pushing for a diplomatic resolution of a conflict that was still at the stage of a civil war. He was loath to expand the negotiations over neutralizing Laos into a general settlement in Vietnam, based on de-escalation and mutually agreed partition. Under Secretary of State George Ball, Averell Harriman (newly appointed assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs) and the US Ambassador to New Delhi John Kenneth Galbraith urged this course on him. Galbraith envisaged using the Indians as a backchannel to Hanoi, and Harriman slipped into a Geneva kitchen to hold clandestine talks with the North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Ung Van Khiem. Khiem, wearing a Soviet suit much too large for him, wasted the opportunity by raging at the seventy-year-old American statesman. Harriman drew himself up to his full height to tower over Khiem, looked the ‘insulting little thug’ in the eye and told him he ‘was in for a long, tough war’.22

  The Soviets would certainly have come aboard any negotiated settlement. Khrushchev was as exasperated by ‘all those silly Laotian names or the individuals to whom these names belonged’ as were Americans such as Ball, who described the names as a series of typographical errors. ‘Laos, Vietnam, all Southeast Asia,’ Khrushchev exclaimed to Harriman. ‘You and the Chinese can fight over it. I give up. We give up. We don’t want any of it!’23 The problem was their respective clients, who were not really clients at all. Diem knew he would be an early casualty of any broadening of the Saigon regime to make it more pluralistic, while the North Vietnamese could not be persuaded to pretend that any popular-front arrangement would be anything other than a temporary arrangement prior to their complete takeover of South Vietnam.

  Supposedly dependable numbers and not old-fashioned perceptions of linguistic nuances and cultural differences led to insufficient urgency being given to the exploration of these possibilities. Even at this early stage, the US military were quantifying victory in terms of body counts, prisoners taken, numbers of aerial sorties and so on, the only language understood by Defense Secretary McNamara; for this, as David Halberstam argued so persuasively in The Best and the Brightest, was above all McNamara’s war. He completely eclipsed Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the loyal Presbyterian who saw it as his job to express his own views only in private to the President, and sometimes not even then.

  A registered Republican, McNamara was the supreme can-do guy in the Kennedy administration, an academic accountant and statistician turned whizz-kid president of the giant Ford automobile company. Although he looked about as buttoned down as it was possible to be with his slicked-back dark hair and large, black-rimmed glasses, he had read widely and was able to exchange quotations with the academics in the Kennedy entourage. Having made his pile with what were naively thought to be infinitely transferable skills, he was now driven by a desire for power unqualified by any moral considerations. There was something chilling about a man who could spend eight hours watching data slides on Vietnam on a screen, only to call for the projector to be stopped because something on slide 869 did not tally with slide 11. If information did not come to him in the form of numbers or tables, McNamara had difficulty processing it and he was widely regarded as a barely human computer.24

  The numbers flowing from MACV encouraged optimism, but the soldiers were lying to themselves as much as to Washington. A persistent American complaint was that the Viet Cong would never stand and fight, preferring to hit and run in the way natural to ‘raggedy-assed little bastards’. This was to underrate the pressures which the war exerted on Viet Minh commanders; if they failed then their peasant support might leach away. They were also required to undertake self-criticism among their troops, acknowledging and learning from their mistakes. The hierarchical US military insulated senior commanders from the truth and led to the reinforcement of failure, as did the good-old-boy fraternity-ring mafia among senior officers.

  In January 1963 intelligence reported three Viet Cong companies grouped around a radio transmitter near the hamlet of Ap Bac, forty miles south-west of Saigon. An entire ARVN division was deployed against them. Instead of fleeing, the Viet Cong dug in and prepared to fight. The attack was a classic pincer operation, landing one force in helicopters despite thick fog, while another closed in with armoured personnel carriers. There was a substantial reserve force, and artillery and air cover. With a ten-to-one ARVN superiority, what could go wrong?

  Almost everything, concluded the senior US adviser, Lieutenant-Colonel John Paul Vann, as he circled the battlefield in a spotter plane. After allowing the helicopter pilots to think the landings were unopposed, the Viet Cong unleashed deadly and sustained fire that destroyed five helicopters. The armoured units were slow in going t
o their relief, and when they did they too were ambushed amid near-total command chaos as Diem’s political appointees ignominiously failed their first test of combat. They had also subverted the entire point of the operation by leaving the Viet Cong an escape route, and, to round it off, when another airborne battalion was inserted, it was in the wrong place and a massive friendly-fire episode resulted.

  Only because they were such poor shots was the death toll limited to sixty-one ARVN troops dead and a hundred wounded; the Viet Cong had vanished, leaving behind only three dead. They had even taken away their spent cartridge cases for reuse. As MACV proclaimed Ap Bac a major victory because the Viet Cong had conceded the field, a South Vietnamese artillery commander unleashed a pointless barrage on a village he believed deserted but which was actually occupied by ARVN troops. After realizing his mistake he shot the lieutenant acting as a forward observer, which under the circumstances seems to have been justified.25

  Washing Diem Away

  Seldom has an imperial power put its prestige behind a more suicidal group of puppets than the Ngo Dinh clan. Diem’s younger brother Nhu and his ghastly wife were bad enough, but it was elder brother Pierre Martin Ngo Dinh Thuc, Archbishop of Hué and the senior Catholic prelate in Vietnam, who did for his family. In May 1963 he prohibited the display of Buddhist banners during the celebrations commemorating the birth of the Gautama, citing a regulation prohibiting the display of non-government flags. Yet a few days earlier Catholics had been encouraged to fly Vatican flags to celebrate Thuc’s twenty-fifth anniversary as bishop, to pay for which the mainly Buddhist residents of Hué had been taxed by Ngo Dinh Can, another younger brother, who ran central Vietnam with a private army and his own secret police.26

  On 8 May 1963 large crowds gathered in Hué to protest against the ban were fired on by Can’s thugs, killing nine protesters. Can and Diem blamed the Viet Cong, but in early June a sixty-six-year-old Buddhist bonze called Thich Quang Duc sat down in a lotus position at a Saigon junction and set himself alight with gasoline. What many American observers had regarded as a passive faith, until they saw Quang Duc in flames on the cover of Life, quickly became a powerful protest movement.27

  Six more Buddhist priests immolated themselves with much further publicity, which Madame Nhu crassly described as ‘barbecues’. ‘Let them burn, and we shall clap our hands,’ she said. Although Diem assured the departing US Ambassador Frederick Nolting that he would take no further measures against the Buddhists, in August Nhu’s Special Forces (dressed as ARVN infantry) raided pagodas across the land, violently arresting 1,400 monks and sending them to join the already large number of political prisoners. Such operations brought the South Vietnamese army into such public discredit that some of its officers resolved on a coup.

  The US government’s disaffection with Diem reached breaking point when it learned that Nhu was engaged in secret talks with Hanoi. The North Vietnamese were happy to play along, calculating that once they got the Americans out they could rid themselves of the Ngo Dinhs. This intelligence report on the clandestine meeting arrived in Washington on a Saturday, when the most senior players were away from their desks. Three officials, including Harriman, seized the opportunity to draft instructions to the new US Ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, to the effect that if Diem could not rid himself of the Nhus then Diem himself would have to go.

  Lodge would play a key role in the coup. He was the incumbent Massachusetts Senator so narrowly defeated by Kennedy in 1952 and was Nixon’s running mate in 1960. JFK shrewdly sent him to Saigon as a lightning rod for Republican critics of his policy in South-east Asia. If a man who had twice lost murky elections to JFK was prepared to work for him, then Congressional Republicans should also accept him. Unlike Nolting, the tough patrician Lodge took an instant dislike to Diem. He also mistrusted CIA chief Richardson so much that he used a journalist to blow Richardson’s official cover. Lodge’s fresh instructions included permission to tell dissident Vietnamese generals that the US would support them ‘in any interim period of breakdown of central government mechanisms’. JFK cleared this signal from his Hyannis Port compound, although it is unclear whether he saw the whole cable or only had it read to him over the telephone. When he returned to Washington on Monday he found his cabinet almost at war with itself, as the cats discovered what the mice had done in their absence.

  From then on the machinations in Saigon became frankly byzantine. Nhu and Diem had wind of the coup, and the plotters had to proceed with great caution. Lodge’s surrogate was Lucien Conein, the CIA’s secret liaison with the generals. Conein had been in Indochina for eighteen years, a pulp-fiction spy with a French twist, who crisscrossed Saigon accompanied by a heavy Magnum revolver in case Nhu, who was exhibiting signs of opium-induced paranoia, decided to have him assassinated. Conein met with General Tran Van Don, the notional head of the army, at a dentist’s office. The key conspirators included Don’s brother-in-law, General Le Van Kim, and General Duong Van Minh, the former corporal known as ‘Big Minh’. Like Don, all of them had been shuffled into marginal posts because Diem distrusted their popularity among the troops. Others whose careers would benefit from the removal of Diem and Nhu were recruited, including General Ton That Dinh, commander of Saigon district.

  The conspirators had to be careful when meeting their MACV opposite numbers, since they were not apprised of the change in US policy and supported Diem. MACV chief Harkins did not even know that Vietnamese-speaking army signals officers had been brought in from the Philippines to transcribe the take from microphones planted to eavesdrop on the plotters when Conein was not present. Lodge, also, had to be careful because Nhu had comprehensively bugged the US embassy. Preparations for the coup went ahead with apparently routine command changes gradually moving Diem loyalists further from Saigon to prevent them rushing to defend the regime. Astrologers were consulted to divine which date had the most favourable aspects.28

  There was one hiatus, as a further top-level delegation, led by McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, arrived in late September 1963, with William Colby along for the CIA. The last such visit, by Marine General Victor Krulak and the State Department’s Joseph Mendenhall, had prompted JFK’s famous quip: ‘The two of you did visit the same country, didn’t you?’29 McNamara had been appalled by the idea of removing Diem, not least because MACV’s General Harkins was reporting a war almost won. It seemed illogical to change the winning team in such circumstances. Certain aspects of the visit meant that ‘the computer’ began to be malfunction. While Diem’s two-hour opening monologue was nothing unusual – for McNamara had been to Vietnam before – there was the bizarre experience of staying with Lodge, who told him Diem was a lost cause, and then being briefed by Harkins’s staff who told him that nothing was wrong. Knowing McNamara’s obsession with facts and figures, the military men presented the war in such terms, with Harkins and Taylor beaming at their mastery of flow charts and graphs.

  The Potemkin village collapsed when it came to a briefing on a certain province in the Mekong Delta. A young major, answering helpful questions from Maxwell Taylor, affirmed that everything in the Delta was hunkydory. However, McNamara had a copy of a report by a young CIA officer and rural affairs adviser called Rufus Phillips, which had caused serious ructions when it had been discussed by the NSC on 10 September. Phillips sent back a report by a US civilian adviser who bleakly estimated that the Viet Cong were in charge of 80 per cent of villages in the Delta, and affirmed that a US Army adviser had been reporting to his superiors in similar terms, without receiving any response. McNamara asked the young Major if he had read the reports. Yes, he had. Did he agree with them, asked the Defense Secretary. After a pause, for his eyes to flit over Harkins and Taylor, the Major said he did. Why hadn’t he reported the same developments? They were ‘beyond the parameters set by his superiors’.30

  As they returned to Washington, McNamara and Taylor drew up their mission report. It included such gems as ‘our policy is to seek to b
ring about the abandonment of Diem’s repression because of its effect on the popular will to resist’. Despite concluding that the military programme ‘has made great progress and continues to progress’, such that a thousand US advisers could be withdrawn by Christmas, the two men agreed that relations with Diem should be ‘correct’ while a search was made for ‘alternative leadership’.31

  On 1 November the conspirators moved, with Conein bustling about the capital armed with large bags of money. Their task was made easier by Nhu, who out-clevered himself by mounting a phoney coup to draw the real plotters into the open, which meant his own troops were not where they were needed when the real coup took place. Regime loyalists such as the head of Special Forces guarding Diem were arrested and summarily shot. After their pleas to Cabot Lodge were coldly rebuffed, Diem and Nhu managed to flee the palace for the Chinese quarter of Cholon, leaving the conspirators to storm the abandoned building. Trusting in assurances the plotters had given the Americans, Diem and his brother eventually agreed to surrender at St Francis Xavier’s Catholic church. When ‘Big Minh’ sent a select team to pick them up, by gestures he indicated that they must die. Diem and Nhu were bound and loaded into an armoured personnel carrier, and were butchered during the journey into central Saigon. The APC had to be hosed out afterwards.

  Diem was briefly replaced by a twelve-man military junta that operated from an HQ near Tan Son Nhut Airport. On 29 January 1964 it was overthrown by a group of younger officers under General Nguyen Khanh, again with American connivance. Khanh was so uncertain about his own future that he took up residence in a villa on the Saigon River, convenient if he had to flee by boat. The CIA reckoned the new regime’s longevity in terms of weeks or months.32

  When he learned that Diem and Nhu had been killed, JFK paled and rushed from the room, suddenly brought face to face with what he and some of the most liberal members of his administration had done. One might legitimately wonder who he and his colleagues thought would replace Diem, for the alternatives were more dismal than him, if they could be identified at all. Three weeks later Kennedy was himself assassinated, so we cannot know whether he would have continued down the blood-smoothed slope or would have found the moral courage to back off. It seems unlikely: he had no reason to believe that South Vietnam was a lost cause, especially with the Ngo Dinhs out of the way, and his fear of being seen as soft on Communism was as strong as ever.33 Responsibility for Vietnam devolved on a big-hearted but corrupt and cunning man who in domestic policy hoped to begin where FDR rather than JFK had left off. What happened to him deserves the epithet tragic.