JFK (18 page)

Although the men of the Saigon Military Mission had many other duties in Vietnam, their biggest task was to keep Ngo Dinh Diem alive, and they solved this problem in a typical CIA manner for ten years.

If the truth were known, the chief of state of most Third World countries today—under the rules of the superpower world game—owes his job and his life, day by day, to an elite palace guard that he can control and, he hopes, trust.

In many countries around the world, the leaders of the elite guard have been trained by the CIA or the KGB. Originally, Diem had none of these essentials of power, so the Saigon Military Mission turned to the Philippines, where it had just succeeded in ousting President Quirino and putting Magsaysay in the Presidential Palace.

The Saigon Military Mission borrowed one of Ramon Magsaysay’s closest friends and aides from his own elite guard: Col. Napoleon Valeriano.

Valeriano had selected and trained Magsaysay’s elite guard. This amazing Filipino would later play an important part in the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961. He arrived in Saigon with three junior officers from the same Filipino elite guard to begin the process of selecting Vietnamese who for one reason or another could be expected to be loyal to Ngo Dinh Diem. These candidates were then flown to Manila for training and indoctrination.

One way to guarantee loyalty to the ruler is to employ only those men who have wives and children and then to provide a place for those wives and children to live—as hostages. This hostage environment helps to assure “undying loyalty.”

Slowly, Diem was able to act more and more as the head of state, just like his more experienced counterparts in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma, all of whom had been beneficiaries of similar CIA elite guard assistance.

During this period, relations between the nominal chief of state, Bao Dai, and the premier, Diem, worsened. In 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem, the CIA’s newcomer, called for a popular referendum in this newly delineated piece of real estate called South Vietnam to decide whether Bao Dai should continue as chief of state or whether the country should become a republic under his own leadership as president.

It was quite an experience to prepare for an election in a new country that had never had a real one before, especially when many of its millions of residents did not know the country existed or where its borders were located or who Ngo Dinh Diem was. With its recent experience of a similar nature in the Philippines, however, the CIA felt quite certain that this “free, democratic” election would favor its man. In any case, the leaders of the SMM were going to see that their men counted the ballots.

It was in response to challenges like this that the SMM’s special talents revealed themselves. Someone located and then ordered one million tiny “phonograph” toys. They were delivered with a brief political speech recorded by Ngo Dinh Diem. The villagers, who had never seen or heard of anything like this before, were astounded. Such modern “witchcraft” as this “voice in a box” helped guarantee the election of Diem.

Diem received 98 percent of the vote, and on October 26, 1955, he proclaimed the area south of the 17th parallel—actually the legal line of demarcation was the river known as Song Ben Hai, but it was usually referred to as the 17th parallel—the Republic of Vietnam. As a result of this election, Ngo Dinh Diem became its first president.

This brought matters full circle. At the National Security Council meeting of January 29, 1954, the Dulles brothers laid plans for the creation of a new nation that would be backed by the United States, to continue the then “nine-year” war in Indochina.

It had taken them almost two years to witness the defeat of the French, the dissolution of the Bao Dai government, the movement of Ngo Dinh Diem from exile to the position of premier in Saigon, and finally Diem’s installation as president and “Father of his Country” in South Vietnam. None of this could have happened without the skillful undercover work of the CIA and its experienced Saigon Military Mission.

NINE YEARS of the manipulation of the American war-making machine in Indochina began to pay off for the power elite in a big way in 1954. By that time, American blood had been shed in Indochina, and nearly $3 billion had been spent. A major conflagration was in the offing. By the end of the Indochinese phase of the Cold War, the cost would be estimated at more than $500 billion, 58,000 American lives, and a serious decline of American prestige.

The French, in Indochina since 1787, had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 and were on their way out. The CIA’s Saigon Military Mission arrived in June. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had said, “We could carry on effective guerrilla operations [in Vietnam] . . . and we can raise hell.” This was precisely what the SMM was there to do: to establish an undercover paramilitary campaign and to raise hell. It had been given the power, the support, and the checkbook by the CIA.

Meanwhile, the Geneva Conference that was to work out a cease-fire between the Vietminh, the French, and the State of Vietnam had convened on April 26, even before the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu on May 7. This conference established a demarcation zone at, or near, the 17th parallel, which divided the former French colonial land into two nearly equal sections. The north would be the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the south was to become the State of Vietnam and later, on October 26, 1955, the Republic of Vietnam.

Before the conclusion of the Geneva Conference, in the summer of 1954, the CIA’s SMM had begun its political, psychological, and terrorist activities against the native population in the northern regions. Using a well-equipped cadre of saboteurs, it performed many terrorist acts in Hanoi and surrounding Tonkin. SMM agents polluted petroleum supplies, bombed the post offices, wrote and distributed millions of anti-Vietminh leaflets, printed and distributed counterfeit money.

As was intended, these clandestine activities played right into the hands of the war makers by creating a growing rift between the Vietminh and the Tonkinese Catholics. No blame was laid upon the SMM until later, when SMM-trained Vietnamese turned themselves in to the Vietminh.

In their own words, as found in documents released by Daniel Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers,
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leaders of the SMM wrote that the mission had been sent into North Vietnam to carry out “unconventional warfare,” “paramilitary operations,” “political-psychological warfare,” and rumor campaigns and to set up a Combat PsyWar course for the Vietnamese. The members of the SMM were classic “agents provocateurs. ”

This activity of the SMM produced one of the most amazing, unusual, and important war-making events of this century—the mass exodus of more than one million Tonkinese natives, presumably Catholics, who were caused to leave their ancestral homeland and pour into the disorganized, strange, and inhospitable southland of Cochin China, as described earlier.

Without a doubt, this mass of Catholic northerners and its unwelcome impact upon the population of the south had more to do with the scope, severity, and duration of the American-made war in Vietnam than anything else. It was an astounding event, for many reasons. First of all, how was such an enormous movement of otherwise immobile people brought about, and how were so many motivated to move that far from their ancient, ancestral homes, land, and villages? Had they been scared to death? And how was everything kept so secret? Most news sources and historical reviews have either avoided or neglected these subjects.

At the time this exodus began in mid-1954, the State of Vietnam as a government was all but nonexistent. Yet it had been placed in charge of all the real estate south of the 17th parallel and of its ancient, settled, and peaceful population, variously estimated at from 10 to 12 million.

There can be no denying the fact that the influx of these hundreds of thousands of strangers on the already war weary (from World War II under the Japanese, from the French battles to retake Cochin China, and from the nine years of war against the Vietminh) southern population pushed them both to the breaking point. They were not the victims of a civil war in the classic sense so much as they found themselves in a situation analogous to that of the American Indians, when hundreds of thousands of Europeans invaded their North American homeland and decided they would take it over for themselves. With the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem in power, these intruders actually thought they had that right.

As reported in the book
Vietnam Crisis
:
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This quite typical interpretation of events that involved one million people leaves many crucial, as yet unanswered questions. The account says a little about the plight of the refugees and nothing about their reluctant hosts—the people of the south. Vietnam was possibly the most “un-Western” of all Asian countries. The Vietnamese had no way to leave their ancestral villages. They could not pack the family into the old Chevy and head down the road for some unknown destination a thousand or fifteen hundred miles away. They had no superhighways with convenient fast-food stops and welcoming motels. At that time, the one north-south railroad line was inoperative and not an alternative.

Indochina is a very ancient land. Vietnam was old in the days of the early Egyptians, Babylonians, and Persians. It is one of the oldest settlements of mankind. To those settled, village-oriented people, obligations to parents and to the emperor were the cement of the Confucian order. Cochin China, the French colony, had changed somewhat as a result of the French occupation that took place between 1861 and 1867, but Annam and Tonkin had not. Yet it was the “unchanged” Tonkinese who were fleeing, and this was what made it all the more remarkable.

To the Tonkinese, the village was a most important institution. In the village, the clans were strong, and the basis of the clan was the veneration of ancestors, which ensured strong attachment to the village and to the land. Each village had a shrine—the “dinh”—which contained the protective deity of that village. The cohesive force of the village was a sense of being protected by those spirits of the soil. Village affairs were in the hands of a council of elderly notables, but there was a considerable degree of autonomy. It was said, “The power of the emperor stops at the bamboo fence.”

The village did pay a tax to the higher authority and did provide young men for military service. In Vietnam, however, law was not based on authority and will but on the recognition of universal harmony. As in all parts of the world, the basic object of rural government was to provide security. As a result, in Vietnam the traditional demand was not for good laws so much as for good men. Law was deemed less important than virtue.
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This describes the village and the land-based society of these natives who had become refugees in their own homeland as a result of the psychological terrorism instigated by the SMM and its religious allies. By all accounts, they had to be the least likely people who ever lived to leave their ancestral soil for some unknown and inhospitable alternative. Little has been said about this clandestine provocation that created such deep fear, but it has to be considered one of the primary causes for the Americanization of the Vietnam War. Once we realize this, we begin to have a much deeper appreciation and understanding of the power of the CIA’s SMM and its unconventional political and psychological warfare techniques not only in Vietnam but elsewhere.

To use John Foster Dulles’s phrase, the SMM knew how to “raise hell,” and the fury of its threats caused 1.1 million of this village-based people to leave. The other side of the coin—and perhaps the explanation for the relative silence of the Vietminh during this massive emigration—is the fact that among these hundreds of thousands of fugitives were thousands of fifth-column Vietminh who concealed their movements southward within the greater mass of refugees.