Jim DIEugenio at VMI on 9/2

[Paul Rigby]

What follows are glorified notes made nearly a decade ago:

Roots of Revolt: The CIA in Vietnam, 1955-1963

The CIA, led on the ground by Edward Lansdale, installed Ngo Dinh Diem as President of South Vietnam in June 1955. It did so in direct defiance of President Eisenhower and his emissary General Lawton Collins. Eisenhower had sought, in the wake of the Korean War, US disengagement from the region. From this perspective, establishing another Syngman Rhee, this time in Vietnam, was merely storing up trouble. In retrospect, it is clear the Agency saw Diem as a mere stop-gap - its preferred protégés were youthful military men, the so-called "Young Turks," in South-east Asia as elsewhere and just over two years later, in August 1957, that faithful Agency conduit, Time, was voicing disapproval of the neutralist tendencies of both Diem and Nhu, his brother-in-law, and chief adviser: "Put simply, Diem is still taking US money…but less and less US advice. One example of this was a decision not to use the phrase anti-Communism' in any speeches" during a recent visit to Thailand." A right-wing American academic who visited Saigon in 1958 later recalled a "Senior Foreign Officer who went to great lengths to discredit the Diem regime, magnify its shortcomings, ridicule Diem's religion and his family, and to urge for a change in U.S policy."

The Agency was unquestionably active on the assassination front in the region: In February 1959, Cambodia police broke up the Dap Chhuon plot and fingered Victor Matsui, a CIA officer working under light diplomatic cover at the Phnom Penh embassy , as the co-ordinating agent. In late August of the same year, a bomb blast at the royal palace in Phnom Penh killed the protocol minister. The following month, Diem reached a modus vivendi with Sihanouk, despite the attempts of Viet-Nam Presse, the official Saigon news bulletin, to sabotage the deal.

Coup and assassination attempts had already commenced against Diem. In late February 1957, an "armored car regiment stationed at Go Vap, six miles from Saigon stood paused to roll on the capital, when the plot was disclosed by a sergeant." Two days later, that perennial spook favourite, an angry "young student," shot at Diem in the village of Ban Me Thuot. It is probable that these attempts were organised outside the aegis of the Agency's Saigon station, most likely by the Agency-within-an-Agency that was the counter-intelligence (and much else besides) section of James Angleton. According to two veteran, and notably well-informed China Lobby propagandists, writing in 1965 in response to the CIA's failure to strike north from Vietnam, successive Saigon station chiefs remained close and loyal to Diem and his brother until 1960. Interestingly, 1959 was the year William Colby moved from deputy chief of Saigon station to the top job. Colby had been a staunch supporter of the CIA's campaign to out Souvanna and reinstate Phoumi Nosavan in Vientiane in 1959. Later in the same year, General Williams, the head of the US military contingent in Saigon, and "one of the staunch protectors of the Diem regime," was also recalled.

Stripped of spook and military protectors, and within days of Kennedy's election as 35th President, CIA-orchestrated a parachutists' revolt in Saigon. The South Vietnamese government first disseminated , then, under intense pressure, retracted, charges of US responsibility, with assistance from British and French spooks and military attaches . In early July 1963, in secret session at the trial of the captured Vietnamese political leadership of the attempted coup, Saigon named the two senior CIA men in charge: George Carver and Howard Elting. The former served under the light cover of an employee of the United States Operations Mission (USOM), while Elting was the deputy chief of the American mission.

The failure of the November putsch saw recourse by the CIA to the tried and trusted strategy of the pseudo-gang. The CIA already had a massive programme in motion it was to become known as the National Liberation Front. It had debuted in March 1960 with a broadcast, ostensibly on a clandestine Viet Cong radio station operating in South Vietnam, of the Proclamation of Former Resistance Fighters. In fact the radio station was a CIA "black radio" op, and the Former Resistance Fighters, the Agency. Hanoi radio immediately denounced it as a trap, but later felt obliged to intervene in an attempt to bring the position in the south under some form of political control and direction. This strategy was to issue in the formation of the National Liberation Front. At the time of Diem's murder, "a probable majority of the NLF's adherents were members" of two bitterly anti-communist sects, "the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao," both of which were simultaneously harried and bought up by the CIA in the initial campaign to install Diem in 1955. As one America observer commented: "The Cao Dai were subdued more by negotiation and intrigue than by military force."

The Agency had forged a similar alliance of left and right in Burma in the early 1950s. The Hanoi leadership combined with Diem to hunt down this CIA "third force": In May 1962, Hoa Hao battalion 104 "was caught in a simultaneous drive by the ARVN and Viet Minh battalion 510." Ho's strategy was consistent with Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence doctrine, and was predicated upon an astute and prescient analysis of domestic conditions encapsulated in his "Descending Spiral Theory." Ho believed that a resumption of guerilla warfare in the South would inevitably issue in a full-scale US invasion. He therefore did everything he could to avoid its recrudescence. The public consistency of Ho's position in favour of a negotiated settlement in 1962 was reflected in three interviews he gave in March, July, and December to, respectively, a British Daily Express journalist, Bernard Fall, and Jules Roy. As Fall wrote: "It was obvious to all three observers that the DRVN had backed off from outright conquest of South Viet Nam and was veering toward a negotiated solution embodying the existence of a neutral South Vietnamese state that would not be reunited with the North for a long time to come."

The mechanics of the resurrection of the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai is a theme notably glossed over by US commentators and historians. In 1959, an American commentator noted that Hoa Hao "insurgent groups" had taken refuge in Cambodia, from where the Cao Dai Pope also continued to exercise influence across the border. In April 1965, the CIA's George A. Carver, Jr., was content to note that both sects "have emerged from nearly a decade of political insignificance to play influential roles, particularly in the provinces where their adherents are concentrated." The CIA's abandonment of not merely Diem and family, but the entire concept of a lone political strong-man ruler in Vietnam, was formally announced by Edward Lansdale, also in the pages of Foreign Affairs, in October 1964. America's repeated attempts at "engineering a great patriotic cause led by some universally loved Vietnamese of American selection," a process in which no US official had been more central than Landsdale himself, were now dismissed as a "puerile romance" which "should not be attempted in real life." The CIA terminated both Diem and concept for a very good reason. There was to be no future civilian-political figure in the South with whom the North could cut a peace deal. Lansdale was effectively advocating the use of pure terror. There is every reason to believe he had been guilty of a great more than mere advocacy during the Kennedy years. According to John Pilger, the creation and use of "Force X," which "infiltrated" the Viet Cong and then undertook "atrocities that would then be blamed on the insurgency" was "pioneered by…Colonel Edward Lansdale."

A series of mass releases of Viet Cong prisoners was organised. In late April 1961, Joseph Alsop, a long-time Agency journalistic mouthpiece, devoted no less than three columns to extolling the virtues of "turned" Viet Cong fighters in the service of US anti-guerilla operations. It was a propaganda line quickly picked up and amplified by other US print media, and at least one British correspondent in Vietnam working for a paper with a long history as an MI6 front. The public raison d'etre of these pseudo-gangs was to hunt down the Viet Cong. In reality, they were used to destroy the Diemist military infrastructure in order to vindicate the CIA claim that Diem was a martial incompetent whose continued leadership of the South would inevitably issue in defeat. A rare public manifestation of this strategy occurred in January 1963, when a Special Forces-trained pseudo-gang over-ran the Diemist garrison at Plei Mrong and committed gross atrocities against the defenders. It was almost certainly an enlarged CIA pseudo-gang that fought the ARVN at the stage-managed "battle" of Ap Bac. In March 1963, a Canadian journalist described a snap-shot of these activities: "US Special Force commandos the hush-hush branch of the Army are in isolated villages and deep in rebel-dominated territory. They are taking a page from Communist tactics and organizing resistance movements and spreading propaganda and terrorism. These young specialists are linguists, politically indoctrinated, and are armed with funds for bribing support. They are prepared to kill and terrorize on their own to defeat the enemy."

At the same time as the pseudo-gangs were unleashed, summer 1961 found Agency-funded Vietnamese opponents of Diem touring the US seeking to dissuade key figures within the American Friends of Vietnam organisation from continuing their backing of Diem , while Irving Brown, the AFL-CIO's roving ambassador (and James Angleton's man), visited Vietnam in October and urged a change of course in his November report. Henceforth, he argued, America should be backing the "liberal" South Vietnamese opposition. By "liberal" Meany meant, of course, right-wing, obedient and entirely in the pocket of the CIA. Throughout 1961 and 1962 a steady stream of articles, chiefly in nominally "liberal" weeklies The Nation and The New Republic, pushed the Agency's line that Diem had to give way to more "civilised" forces who would nevertheless kill more of their fellow-countrymen with greater zeal.

The next major public attempt to assassinate Diem took place on 27 February 1962. Two South Vietnamese air force fighter planes dive-bombed the Presidential palace. The escape was narrow: Madame Nhu fell a full three stories, while Diem himself received a thick coating of dust from his crumbling private apartment. One of the pilots was shot down, while the other, Nguyen Van Cu, took the by now well-worn path back to the Agency bosom in Phnom Penh. (The two Vietnamese parachute officers who fronted the November 1960 coup had fled there, arriving in a US Dakota.) A plainclothes US landing party awaited Cu, but for once the Cambodian authorities intervened . Air support was to prove decisive in Diem's eventual overthrow. The planes, nominally belonging to the South Vietnamese air force, were flown by US pilots. Two months later, Allen Dulles arrived in Saigon as part of a shadowy Pentagon "study" group under the pretext of checking morale.

In April 1963, Kennedy was "making soundings either directly or through British, French, Indian and other channels - for the kind of diplomatic formula" under which withdrawal could be negotiated. The favoured solution was inevitably based on the Laotian model. Confirmation that it was Kennedy who set the negotiations in motion was to come from Madam Nhu herself. As ever, the Agency was ahead of the presidential game. Three months before, in January, Agency specialists in the art of the coup d'etat began arriving in Saigon where they assumed a variety of covers USOM, MAAG, the Embassy itself, to name but three and set to work "with student and religious groups." A number of the CIA reinforcements came from the Congo, where they had successfully organised the murder of Patrice Lumumba , and led the fight against the United Nations.

The extent of the progress of the negotiations between North and South in late 1963 was considerable. In late October, a matter of days from Diem's overthrow and murder, readers of the New York World-Telegram & Sun were informed, in a report originating in London, that the truce under discussion had "possible wider ramifications." In the early 1970s, as the US establishment called time on the cost of the Vietnam imbroglio, a select group of journalists and academics suddenly remembered these negotiations and their progress. They were united only in omitting reference to Kennedy's backing for them.

In May the US Ambassador, Frederick Nolting, was conveniently recalled and the Agency mice set to play. It was at this juncture that the CIA unleashed its great propaganda triumph of the Vietnam War, the Buddhist "uprising" which did so much, as intended, to thwart the White House's hopes for a Laotian-style deal and withdrawal.

The notion of the protesting Buddhists as apolitical religious martyrs went largely unchallenged by the mainstream US media of the time. This was a trifle odd as Western intelligence use of Buddhists and Buddhism, replicating that of Muslim and Christian organisations, against leftists and nationalists during the Cold War, was neither new nor particularly hidden. MI6, from Bangkok, had financed pro-Western candidates in the rigged 1954 Laos elections, almost certainly with the financial support of the CIA. It undertook the same activities in Vietnam. The Agency funded books and training courses for Buddhists, with "many bonzes sent for advanced… training to India and Burma; some of them at United States expense and others at the expense of an American private foundation. When they returned to Laos, some of them were found to have acquired a solid foundation of Marxism…" There is every reason to assume the same applied to their Vietnamese counterparts. The titular head of the Buddhist revolt in Vietnam in 1963 was based at Yale, the academic and social home of the CIA, at its outbreak. And as David Halberstam, "with his excellent sources in the Central Intelligence Agency," reported in the pages of the New York Times, the CIA openly despatched its agents into the pagodas, and maintained daily contact with the Buddhist priests.

Diem had every right to be suspicious of the political use and role of Buddhist monks in the war waged against neutralism by the CIA. Mid-morning on the 25 September 1959, the Ceylonese Prime Minister, Bandaranaike, an "advocate of neutralism and socialism," was shot by an assassin "with a shaven head wearing the yellow robes of a Buddhist monk." Another monk was later brought before the Chief Magistrate. According to the Inspector-General of police, the gunman was "a Buddhist monk who…was teaching at a college of indigenous medicine in Colombo."

Roots of Revolt: CIA in Southeast Asia, 1945-1963

The CIA picked up were the OSS left off. In 1945, "M. Preston Goodfellow, the senior U.S. intelligence operative…personally brought Syngman Rhee back in Korea against the wishes of the State Department." On Formosa and outlying islands, Presidential authority, by this time Eisenhower's, fared no better, as Andrew Tully noted in 1962: "Both State's Dulles and President Eisenhower later would complain that the build-up of Chiang's guerillas on Queymoy and Matsu was foolish…in 1953 and 1954 there is no doubt that both the CIA and the Pentagon…not only encouraged but assisted the build-up that was to cause the United States considerable uneasiness."

The picture was no different in Burma, where two successive US Ambassadors first David McK. Key (July 1952) , then William Sebald (July 1954) - resigned in protest at continuing CIA support for Kuomintang forces, in direct defiance of White House policy and State Department denials. The Agency stepped up its support for the KMT forces in 1959, and Kennedy duly inherited the problem. Like his predecessor, Kennedy promised the Burmese government to pressure Formosa into withdrawing its forces, only to find the Agency ignoring his policy. In early March 1962, the Burmese military, backed by the CIA , overthrew Prime Minister U Nu and his government.

The CIA used the KMT units in Burma as a source of (drug) revenue, and, more importantly to begin with, a tool of provocation: Peking was to be lured across the border in pursuit of the KMT raiders, thus reviving and broadening the Korean War. KMT units were also present across the similarly ill-defined border in northern Laos, performing the same functions. It was here, from 1960 to 1962, that the clash between successive US Ambassadors and the Agency was to receive more extensive exposure.

Whatever the rhetoric emanating from Foster Dulles, the Eisenhower Administration and the State Department consistently sought to work with neutralist leaders. The policy was anathema to the Agency and the Pentagon, and was predictably defied and subverted. In Laos, the CIA's strategy was necessarily more machiavellian than in less sensitive regions, for here the Eisenhower line enjoyed considerable support from political and diplomatic though not from intelligence and military - elites in Paris and London determined to prevent a repetition of their costly and counter-productive involvements in Korea.

The Agency's solution to the stalemate that resulted from State's support for the neutralist Souvanna, which effectively negated its own for Phoumi, was Kong Le. In early August 1960, Le, a classic "Young Turk" protege of the Agency, fronted a coup ostensibly in the name of patriotic nationalism. He spent the eve of the coup in the classic left-wing manner - working through "a special tactical problem" with "American and French advisers: How to hold and defend a major city." Another well-informed source placed Kong Le, on the eve of the coup, in the company of his CIA case officer. (The versions are not, of course, mutually incompatible.) "Each of his soldiers" from the 2nd Laos Parachute Battalion "carried medallion-fashion around his neck a small transistor radio set" from which came instructions courtesy of the previously seized Radio Vientiane. The radios supplier? The American tax-payer.

The August coup was the first of a series of choreographed moves by the Agency. In December, the CIA's overt puppet, General Phoumi, recaptured Vientiane at much the same time as the paratroopers' revolt began in Saigon. He did so "after an artillery battle more notable for sheer noise than for martial skill or courage," and promptly allowed, doubtless under guidance from his Agency advisers, Kong Le's men to escape. Kong Le's actions achieved the three key Agency objectives: the remilitarization of Laotian politics; the diplomatic intervention of the Soviet Union (for which Kong Le campaigned strenuously); and the sabotage of the strategy of the State Department, which had sought to effect an alliance between the right and the genuine neutralists. By April 1963, Kong Le was overtly back in the US fold, his mission accomplished.

As in Burma, so in Laos: successive US Ambassadors found themselves, and the White House policies they sought to implement, thwarted at every turn. Horace H. Smith, an old Foreign Service hand with extensive experience in the Far East, found that his "job wasn't being made any easier by the fact that during most of his tour in Laos he was being crossed by Central Intelligence Agency operatives nesting in his own embassy." Smith's embassy found itself embroiled in a "running feud" with the CIA, a battle in which the latter had "an invaluable ally in another American agency": the PEO (Programs Evaluation Office), "a body of sixty odd retired' American Army officers." PEO was "simply a device to get around the Geneva agreements." Like many an American Ambassador in the post-war era, Smith wondered who was running US foreign policy, and just how many men the CIA had at large undercutting him. The CIA's revolt in Laos could not have been more blatant, as a New York Times editorial of October 1960 observed: "t is now widely accepted that General Phoumi Nosavan was persuaded to spurn his post in the [Laotian] government and rebel against it by agents of the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States military officers stationed in Laos to run the Laotian Army."

Smith's successor in Vientiane, Winthrop Brown, found his attempts to convene a meeting between the warring Laotian elite were negated when the CIA intervened to direct Boun Oum and Phoumi to revoke their agreement with him. Both the Agency and Military Assistance Advisory Group personnel in Laos "scarcely hid their disapproval," and worked actively to "subvert it." The opposition became so naked in mid-November 1961 that Brigadier Andrew Boyle, commander of the US military "adviser" contingent in Laos, was obliged to threaten "that any enlisted man or officer who violated" his order to desist from public dissent to the Kennedy White House policy "would be returned immediately to the United States with an official reprimand and might face further disciplinary action." A New York Times editorial at the end of the month lamented that "American policy in Laos has often suffered from conflicting action by agents of different branches of the United States Government. In Vientiane the embassy has at times pursued one program, Pentagon men and Central Intelligence operatives still another."

It was to take the intervention of Averill Harriman, by far the most experienced and ruthless of Kennedy's small group of foreign policy point men, to forge agreement on Laos at Geneva in May 1962 and initiate a serious fightback against the Agency in Laos. To achieve and then defend the Geneva Agreements, Harriman was obliged to effect the removal of at least three CIA personnel: John Steeves from the Geneva delegation in July 1961 ; Jack Hazzy, the Agency's controller of Phoumi Nosavan, in February 1962 ; and the Agency's station chief in Vientiane, Gordon L. Jorgensen, in the summer of the same year.

Ambassador Allison later recalled a "fruitless" 1957 encounter with the "head of the Far Eastern Section of the CIA," who was utterly convinced of the "imminent Communist danger" throughout the region. Upon Allison's return to Washington he learned that the CIA man had "reported that Sukarno was beyond redemption and that the American Ambassador seemed confused and was inclined to be soft on communism." Allison's successor similarly opposed the Agency's policy of arming and financing revolts across Indonesia.

In Indonesia in mid-1963, an American academic found President Sukarno "still much concerned about the CIA's hostility toward him…Sukarno regarded Ambassador Allison and his successor, Howard P. Jones, as separate from the CIA and acting autonomously from it. I then had the sense that Sukarno was no more clear than I whether State Department and CIA policies that impinged on Indonesia emanated from the same or different sources."

Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk was similarly perplexed at much the same time: "I was officially informed by President Kennedy that on his honour' his country had played no role in the affairs of the Khmer Serei. I considered President Kennedy…an honourable man but, in that case, who really represented the American government? Almost at the same time as I received this assurance, traitors like Preap In were openly asserting that the CIA completely controlled the Khmer Serei of which Preach In was a leading cadre…I was not the only one to ask who, and what is, the American government?" By November 1963, after a long series of coup and assassination attempts, Sihanouk had had enough. He unilaterally terminated US economic aid, just as he had previously called a halt to US military assistance. The decision was made on the eminently practical ground that US economic aid "was being used to finance CIA-directed activities inside the country." Sihanouk's move prompted the third of Ricahrd Starnes' assaults on the Agency in the months of October and November 1963. Both Kennedy and Johnson, "seeking accommodations with the Prince, directed the Agency to cease all such support" for the Khmer Serei and other groups opposed to Sihanouk's neutralist rule.

"Once again," Richard Starnes observed for the Scripps-Howard group, "the Central Intelligence Agency is credited with playing a role in a calamitous undoing of American aims." He mocked the State Department's by-now ritual denial of CIA malfeasance: "There is a rich and growing literature showing that too often the State Department doesn't know what the patient plotters of the CIA are doing…Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk, vain and bombastic as he is, is not stupid. He is no more likely to eviscerate Santa Claus than any other money-hungry Oriental despot is unless he has what seems to be a compelling reason. The State Department may not believe the CIA was conspiring" in his overthrow, "but the prince thought so."

Even dismissing Sihanouk's explanations for his decision "as the paranoiac ravings of an uneasy tyrant," the CIA still failed to pass muster: "The fact remains that the United States secret, wholly unaccountable spy bureaucracy had carte blanche in Cambodia, had unlimited resources, and failed. It not only failed to keep Cambodia out of the Communist orbit, it provided Sihanouk with an excuse to cast out the last vestiges of American influence." He concluded with an implicit defence of criticism of the Agency, and a side-swipe at its blue-blooded invincibility: "All this, in the Orwellian language of Washington's CIA stiffs, will be cited as more evidence of the sad truth that the spook get the lumps…but never get credit…The CIA remains above the battles of agencies which have to account for themselves. Only from time to time (and at times like this), its well-bred murmur is heard in the expense clubs in the nation's capital, explaining why it cannot be held accountable to democratic processes, as all our other great organs of government, secret and overt, are."

The following morning, John F. Kennedy made the short trip from Fort Worth to Dallas.