JFK (19 page)

Throughout the long history of the warfare, and in Cochin China especially, it was always difficult to tell friend from foe. During my many trips there at this time, I was often told, “The barber who uses his razor to shave you in the morning will cut your throat with that same razor after dark.”

More than anything else, the Vietnam War was marked by internal strife. Some of the most vicious fighting during the early years of that struggle took place in the Camau Peninsula and other remote southern areas that had always been relatively wealthy farmland, peaceful, and, by geography, most removed from the Tonkin strongholds of the Vietminh.

The reason for this was partly due to the impact of the infiltration by the Vietminh fifth column and the troublesome impact of hundreds of thousands of refugees. It was just the sort of situation the CIA and the KGB desired in order to keep the invisible war boiling. After its first year in Indochina, the SMM reported that it had been able to arrange for the transport of these refugees, as though transport were all there was to this enormous exodus. As a result, a contract was let, through U.S. government sources, to Civil Air Transport (CAT) Airlines to provide an airlift to augment navy transport operations.

For those who have not heard of this airline, and the many other airlines like it, CAT Airlines was a CIA proprietary corporation chartered in Delaware and based on Taiwan but available for CIA needs anywhere in the world. SMM arranged for the U.S. Navy to provide a sealift from North Vietnam to the south. The scope of the project was so massive as to be unbelievable. CAT’s primary aircraft were the World War II, Curtiss-manufactured U.S. Air Force C-46 type, in civilian dress. It would have taken more than ten thousand flights or more than one thousand U.S. Navy boatloads carrying one thousand refugees each to move one million people one thousand miles.

By sharing the load and by recognizing that many of these fleeing refugees walked to the south, the burden on CAT Airlines and on the U.S. Navy was made somewhat more reasonable. It still remains one of the major mass movements of people in modem times. Why was it done? Why was such an inhumane activity planned and carried out? There can be but one answer. It was to provide the climate, and the fodder, for the war in Vietnam.

But how was it done? How could the SMM and its mentors get away with such an enormous operation?

Ho Chi Minh and all northern Vietnamese, at the time of the Geneva Agreements, believed the nation to be “one.” They did not want a division of their country. As the Geneva Agreements had guaranteed, there was to be an election in order that the people might choose the government of a single unified Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh had said this repeatedly in many public addresses. There were many “incidents” as a result of this exodus, such as the one in Ba Lang in January 1955, when Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam used force against the “Catholics” who were attempting to flee from north to south.

Most Americans believe that if an agreement is reached by concerned governments at a conference, as happened in Geneva in 1954, that agreement is going to be fulfilled. The agreement did provide for transfer of natives from one zone to another; but the war makers working at the command of the power elite read that small paragraph in a much different way. They had decided to make a big conflagration in Indochina, and this was a certain way to do it. The delegates to the Geneva Conference did not plan this deadly confusion. Their unseen mentors did—and, as circumstances prove, their mentors won the day.

Despite these uprisings in the north, and quite unaccountably, the CIA’s CAT aircraft and the U.S. Navy ships operated in and out of northern ports and transported a major share of these people to the south—dumping them there upon the Cochin Chinese near Saigon.

The people themselves were subjected to massive rumor campaigns and other PsyWar batterings by the SMM and by the Catholic hierarchy in the north. The evacuation of these hundreds of thousands of Catholic Tonkinese had begun in southwestern Red River delta areas in Tonkin, under the urging of the Catholic bishoprics of That Dien and Bui Chu. This started one of the most amazing episodes of the entire thirty-year war and provided one of its least-known and least-understood causes. In addition, it was said the French issued similar evacuation orders.

While it was happening, the U.S. Department of State asserted that it had not been informed of this massive and crucial action. This claim, however, could not have been true. On June 29, 1954, a joint American-British note to the French government included a paragraph:
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“. . . provides for the peaceful and humane transfer, under international supervision, of those people desiring to be moved from one zone to another in Vietnam.”

The Americans, British, and French knew about this mass exodus and kept it very secret. The Geneva Conference on the Cessation of Hostilities in Vietnam concluded its work on July 20 and 21, 1954. As a result, a cease-fire was scheduled to take place in southern Vietnam at 8:00 A.M. on August 11, 1954. The closing article of those Geneva Agreements, Number 14, a scarcely noticed few lines, read: “. . . any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party, who wish to go and live in the zone assigned to the other party, shall be permitted and helped to do so by the authorities in that district.”

The brutal and sinister meaning of this “genocide by transfer” was skillfully concealed under the cloak of gentle words. The American-British note spoke of a “peaceful and humane transfer.” The Geneva Agreements speak of those people “who wish to go and live,” as though they were being kind and thoughtful by providing a means for these people who had lived all their lives in a settled village environment, as their ancestors had for more than ten thousand years, to get up and move.

The people of the world, most of whom had never even heard of the Tonkinese and had no idea of their ancient village history, were supposed to think that this offer to transfer these poor people a thousand miles or more was a most benevolent gesture. And, what is even worse, the people of the world were never supposed to learn that this movement of one million people was really intended—by the war makers—to provide all the elements for a bitter chapter of the Cold War.

This is how the Americanization of that warfare began. Looking back over the decades, it is incomprehensible to think of one million settled, peaceful, penniless people being uprooted in this manner and moved to southern Vietnam. Consider what it would take to cause a million New Yorkers to leave their homes, their friends, and their jobs and move to Alabama, where they would be heartily disliked as intruders, strangers, and troublemakers. But this is what was done. And it was done by the CIA just after that agency had overthrown the government of Guatemala, the government of the Philippines, and the government of Iran. Vietnam was simply the unlucky place chosen for the next major phase of the Cold War.

The role of these refugees in the creation of the intensity of this warfare was important. Although the French military had been ignominiously defeated, it was prepared to survive “the painful glory of Dien Bien Phu.” As French foreign minister Christian Pineau said to the Council of the Republic, “I am in a good position in this house to say that when the government of Monsieur Diem was formed I declared very clearly that it was not in my opinion the best formula.” But, he said, “a commercial agreement links us with the country.”

The French military had left, on orders from Diem—but the huge Michelin rubber interests were still there, and the French banking interests and other commercial establishments were still there, so all was well for the French. They were in place to benefit immeasurably from the Americanization of the war. This was true also of the entrenched Chinese mercantile groups, the Australians, and the New Zealanders, who, because of their relative proximity to Indochina, became the greengrocers, merchants, and bankers in Vietnam (particularly for the enormous illicit fortunes made in Vietnam) during the “American episode.”

It was one thing for the one million refugees to leave northern Vietnam; it was an entirely different matter for them to arrive in the South to take up homes, land, and key jobs.

As has been stated above, in 1954 and 1955 the south was disorganized. It had never been a true nation-state. Diem, its premier and later its president, was an outsider from Annam who had long been living in exile. All police power had vanished with the departure of the French. The economy had been shattered with the ouster of the Chinese in response to a Diem edict. And the nation had no army to protect its leader or to defend the republic.

Into this mess came the one million, one hundred thousand.

Cochin China, the land of the south, was an ancient, rural land. It was the rice bowl of Asia. Long before the war era, more than 13.5 million acres of land had been planted with rice. As far back as 1931, Cochin China had been growing more than two million tons of rice a year. By the 1950s, this figure had been increased to six million tons. South Vietnam had been a major exporter of rice; under Diem, with the economy in chaos, it was forced to import rice to feed the people. This was one of the most horrible legacies of the war years.

The people of Cochin China were relatively wealthy. They lived comfortable, peaceful lives and their village-type local government had been perfected over thousands of years. They needed little from the outside world, and the outside world scarcely knew they existed.

Then the exodus began. The first Interim Report of the International Commission for Supervision and Control in Vietnam, dated December 25, 1954, said: “The commission took measures to secure freedom of movement in the case of about eight thousand refugees.”

The foreign secretary of Great Britain, Anthony Eden, said in the House of Commons on November 8, 1954: “The House should recall that in Vietnam. . . arrangements [had] to be made to move tens of thousands of the population from the region of Hanoi to the South. . . .”

A September 19, 1954, Franco-American communique said: “In this spirit France and the United States are assisting the government of Vietnam in the resettlement of the Vietnamese who have of their own free will moved to free Vietnam and who already number some three hundred thousand.”

A message from President Eisenhower to Premier Diem on October 23, 1954, said: “Your recent request for aid to assist on the formidable project of the movement of several hundred thousand loyal Vietnamese citizens away from areas which are passing under a de facto rule and political ideology which they abhor, are being fulfilled. I am glad that the United States is able to assist in this humanitarian effort.”

Then, in a speech delivered nationwide over radio and television in the United States on March 8, 1955, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said: “As always, when international communism moves in, those who love liberty move out, if they can. So far, about six hundred thousand persons have fled from northern Vietnam, and before the exodus is over, the number of refugees will probably approach one million. It is not easy for southern Vietnam to absorb these new peoples. They are destitute and penniless persons with only such possessions as they can carry on their backs.”

It is exceedingly strange to look back to that time and discover that the officials closest to the action, the International Commission, thought that eight thousand people were moving. The British thought “tens of thousands” were moving. The French, who were still very much on the scene, estimated the number at three hundred thousand. Then the prime mover himself, John Foster Dulles, told it as it actually was, nearly, predicting that the figure would “approach one million.”

As the refugees moved into the south, the U.S.-advised Diem government began to place many of these Catholics in key offices. Typical of the way things developed, Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, a northern Catholic who had left Tonkin China in 1954, was made chief of the Office of Political and Social Affairs, the secret government apparatus that had been organized by the CIA to keep tabs on dissenters.

In Communist countries, this is called the “block” system. It is an oppressive, omnipresent internal spy organization that uses teachers to gather information from children, wives to tell on husbands, and employers to inform on employees.

Thousands of these northern Catholics were put into such positions of responsibility by the CIA and the Diem government.

It didn’t take long before the friction between the southern natives and the Diem-favored northern intruders broke out into fighting and riots. These peaceful southern farmers and villagers rebelled against the intrusion of these refugees on their land, in their villages, and in the new Diem government, which none of them liked anyway.

Before long, the “friends,” according to the Diem brothers and their CIA backers in Saigon, were the one million northern Catholics, and the “enemy”—or at least the “problem”—was the native southerners.

The time was right to fan the flames into war and to bring in the Americans. The first wave of Americans to arrive were the “Do Gooders,” or, as others have seen them, the “Ugly Americans.”

In an attempt to create a new nation, to provide it with the means to defend itself with police and an army, to develop its agriculture and economy, and to create schools and hospitals, all kinds of Americans were brought into Indochina to work with the CIA and its Saigon Military Mission, to work with the growing U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group, and to increase the manpower of the CIA’s many proprietary companies in Southeast Asia and their burgeoning band of mercenaries.

The next stage of the Americanization of Vietnam was being set. The plan was to destroy the ancient villages and to replace them with all the advantages of the Western way of life. Someone had decided it was time for the Vietnamese to have the luxury of fast-food hamburgers and fried chicken, not to mention Cadillacs and TV, served up with the American brand of home-view violence and ideology.