Prouty on Lansdale

[Lauren Johnson]

This mission was not in Saigon. It was not military, and its job was subversion in Vietnam. Its biggest job was that it got more than 1,100,000 northern Vietnamese to move south. 660,000 by U.S.Navy ships and the rest by CIA airline planes. These 1,100,000 north Vietnamese became the "subversive" element in South Vietnam and the principal cause of the warmaking.

This seems really absurd. How could Lansdale convince a million NV to go south to become the core of the VC. Am I misreading this?