29-03-2009, 08:07 PM
Nathaniel Heidenheimer Wrote:THESE QUESTIONS...
1) CAN SOMONE GIVE ME SOLID NUMBERS OF HOW MANY US TOTAL MILITARY PERSONNEL THERE WERE IN VIETNAM ON 11-22-63 HOPEFULLY THE BREAKDOWN . ALSO NUMBERS OF INTEL PEOPLE. ( I REALIZE THERE MAY BE AN OVERLAP) I AM ALMOST CERTAIN THAT OUR SORDID LYING TEXT VASTLY OVERSTATED THESE NUMBERS.
2) CAN SOMEONE GIVE ME GOOD NUMBERS ON THE NUMBER OF DEAD US AND VIETNAMESE KILLED BY 11-22-63.
ALSO PLEASE GIVE THE SOURCES OR AT LEAST PLACES TO LOOK.
Also of interest and relevance:
Vietnamese casualties pre-Kennedy:
Democratic Republic of Vietnam Commission for Investigation of the US Imperialists’ War Crimes in Vietnam, “Chronology of the Vietnam War: Book One, 1941-1966,” (Paris: Association D’Amite Franco Vietnamienne, 1968), p.44: “From late 1954 to late 1960, according to incomplete statistics, the Ngo Dinh Diem Administration jailed and tortured 527,000 people, and killed another 77,500.”
Kennedy inherits police state in Saigon:
Jim G. Lucas, “Independence Brings Lurking Fear to Saigon,” New York World-Telegram & Sun, 5 December 1959, p.3: “This is a city in which the secret police are active – ‘worse than under the French,’ many will tell you.”
Pre-Kennedy inauguration (Jan 1961) coup and assassination attempts against Diem:
Quote: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” (1). Days later, that perennial spook favourite, an angry “young student,” shot at Diem in the village of Ban Me Thuot (2). 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 (3). 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 (4). 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 (5).
With Diem stripped of US spook and military protectors, and within days of Kennedy’s election as 35th President, CIA orchestrated a parachutists’ revolt in Saigon (6). The South Vietnamese government first disseminated (7), then, under intense pressure from Washington, retracted (8), charges of US responsibility, reportedly with assistance from British and French spooks and military attaches (9). 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 of the November 1960 coup: George Carver and Howard Elting (10). 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 (11).
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 (12), 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 (13). As one America observer commented: “The Cao Dai were subdued more by negotiation and intrigue than by military force” (14).
(1) Hilaire du Berrier. Background to Betrayal: The Tragedy of Vietnam (Western Islands, 1965), p. 167.
(2) Ibid., p. 166. See also: Foster Haley, “South Vietnam Head Escapes as Gunman Fires at Him at Fair,” NYT, 23 February 1957, pp.1&8. For a rare, albeit fleeting, mention of the attempt in “mainstream” US historiography of the period, see Gregory A. Olson. Mansfield and Vietnam: A Study in Rhetorical Adaptation (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1995), p. 74.
(3) Stephen Pan & Daniel Lyons, S.J. Vietnam Crisis (NY: Twin Circle Publishing, July 1966; this edition, March 1967), p. 105. The CIA itself had earlier suggested that its reassessment of its links with the Diem regime began in April 1963. See David Wise & Thomas B. Ross. The Invisible Government (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), p. 159n.
(4) Stevenson. The End of Nowhere, pp.62 & 104.
(5) Jean Lacouture. Vietnam: Between Two Truces (London: Secker & Warburg, 1966), p. 118.
(6) According to General Tran Van Don, a CIA man accompanied the rebels. See his Our Endless War Inside Vietnam (Presidio Press, 1978), p. 79.
(7) Saigon Committee Against Rebels,” The Times, 16 November 1960, p. 11; and Renee Grosset, “Les ennuis du President Diem,” Le Figaro, 21 November 1960.
(8) AP, “Saigon Drops Charge/Says Accused Western Allies Were Not Behind Revolt,” The New York Times, 19 November 1960, p. 2.
(9) The Times of Vietnam, 15 November, 1960, cited a high Vietnamese official who charged that the coup makers had been moved to rebellion by “colonial and imperialist hands.” (Robert Scigliano. South Viet Nam: Nation Under Stress (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1964), p. 215, n. 66.) “A leaflet distributed by the government-created People’s Committee Against Communist Rebels was more explicit, claiming that the rebellious officers had ‘gotten the support of a group of American, French and British colonialists and imperialists” (Ibid.). In The Making of a Quagmire (p. 49), David Halberstam, a loyal and well-rewarded creature of the CIA, denied Agency sponsorship of the November 1960 coup. The most senior British intelligence figure to have been involved was almost certainly MI6’s Maurice Oldfield. He was to “punished” for his assistance by relocation to Washington, where he served as chief liaison officer between CIA and his own ostensible employers. For an insight into MI6’s desperate desire to serve the CIA in the region in this period, see Kahin & Kahin, p.124.
(10) Only Carver’s name was furnished by David Halberstam, who described him as “an employee of the American military mission.” (“Vietnam Says U.S. Aided ’60 Revolt,” The New York Times, 6 July 1963, pp.1&3.)
(11) “US Envoy hurries back to Saigon,” The Times, 8 July 1963, p. 8. See also: Ellen J. Hammer. A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963 (NY: E.P. Dutton, 1987), p. 154.
(12) Senator Ernest Gruening & Herbert W. Beaser. Vietnam Folly (Washington, D.C.: The National Press, Inc., 1968), p. 186.
(13) George McT. Kahin, “The Pentagon Papers: A Critical Evaluation,” The American Political Science Review, June 1975, (Vol. 69, No. 2), p. 682. One now understands why Hanoi adopted such a seemingly churlish attitude to the NLF post-victory.
(14) Roy Jumper, “Sects and Communism in South Vietnam,” Orbis, Spring 1959, p. 90.
