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WILLIAM
E. COLBY ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW I (PREFERRED CITATION)
Transcript,
William E. Colby Oral History Interview I, 6/2/81, by Ted Gittinger, Internet
Copy, LBJ Library.
INTERVIEW I
DATE: June
2, 1981
INTERVIEWEE:
WILLIAM E. COLBY
INTERVIEWER:
Ted Gittinger
PLACE: Mr.
Colby's office, Washington, D.C.
G: Mr. Colby, when you arrived in Saigon in 1959, how
efficient were our intelligence-gathering efforts concerning the insurgency?
C: Not very, I would say. We primarily depended upon the Vietnamese authorities
and worked with them in collecting information about the insurgency. There
wasn't very much insurgency at that particular stage. The 1954 collapse of the
French had been followed by a period of internal turmoil wherein [Ngo Dinh] Diem
finally took over. He consolidated his position by about 1956 and was engaged in
a very vigorous economic and social development program at that point, which was
proving quite successful. The communists basically had gone into a holding
pattern in 1954, believing that Diem was going to collapse. So did most of the
rest of the world. The communists had withdrawn some fifty thousand of their
people back to the north. They had put their networks into a state of
stay-behind--suspension--and there really wasn't much problem. The government
had become a little heavy-handed in some of its political activities. I've
forgotten what they called the Democratic Front or something that they had, the
National Revolutionary Movement.
G: Denunciation of communism or communist forces?
C: That was about 1956, 1957 really, and that had kind of dropped down by the
time I got there and there wasn't much evidence of it. It was more a
propagandistic effort, not so much in deliberate intelligence targeting. So
quite frankly our intelligence effort at the time was focused on an appreciation
of the political situation in Vietnam and the relationship of Diem to the
various opposition political elements, a limited interest in the old sect
problem, and all this was unilateral American attention. For any coverage of the
communists we basically worked with the Vietnamese authorities, who really
hadn't developed much capability by that time. In the summer of 1959 there was
an attack on an American installation in Bien Hoa, in which I think one American
was killed. This brought attention to the fact that there still was an
insurgency. It came as a bolt out of the blue. It was hard to identify too
clearly where it came from and who started it. But this alerted things and began
to stir things up. Then the really critical thing was that in the fall of 1959
and during 1960 there was a clear increase in communist activity, marked by a
series of terrorist events, by the beginnings of infiltration, primarily of
southerners back from North Vietnam, not northern forces or anything like that.
And [there was] a gradual increase of the insurgency level, which culminated in
November or December, 1960 with the announcement of the establishment of the
National Liberation Front and what amounted to a declaration of war by the North
against the Diem regime or the American Diemists, as they called it, trying to
identify their cause with the cause of nationalism, and trying to stress a
continuity between that effort and the previous effort against the French. This
then led to an increase in our attention to the insurgency problem, primarily
reflected in an attempt to increase the effectiveness of the South Vietnamese
intelligence services: training programs, assistance to them in their
operational activities, liaison with them, some financial assistance to some
particular projects, things of that nature, development of the central
intelligence organization to centralize the information of the variety of
Vietnamese police and military and other intelligence services.
G: Was our relationship more or less harmonious?
C: Oh, yes. We had good relationships with the Vietnamese. They were aware of
our fooling around on our own, I'm sure.
G: Is this what you would call the unilateral--?
C: Yes. They were reasonably understanding of the fact that we were going to do
it. But they dealt with us on the subject of operations against the communist
problem and the beginnings of attention to the North and to try to get some
assets in that area. They worked with us very straightforward, very decently,
and they then did some things on their own, of course, which is not to be
unexpected. The government intelligence services were interested in the
opposition movements and what their activities were and so forth, and they
penetrated them and to some extent controlled them at some times.
G: Was [Ngo Dinh] Nhu heavily involved in these activities?
C: Oh, yes. He was the President's counselor, by name, but with a kind of a
general charter in the political area. He had been interested in the so-called
Can Lao party. He was impressed with the concept of a secret control party, an
application of the Leninist doctrine of the role of the party within the
structure of the state, as a centralized feature. He rejected the communist
approach in the sense of the totalitarian, but he was interested in the French
Catholic philosophy of personalism as an attempt to find a rallying ideology for
South Vietnam to contrast with the ideological appeal of the communists and
their call for revolution. He wanted to revolutionize Vietnamese society, which
he considered as a corrupt inheritance from the French. He wanted to establish
an authentic Vietnamese ideological base for a new society and the rejection of
the old, primarily Catholic elite, replacing it with this new dedication. His
line of thinking changed while I was there. I don't know, I might have had
something to do with it in the last couple of years. Because he had primarily
thought of this Can Lao party as this control element and it being what Lenin
would call the vanguard of the revolution, with the ideological fervor and
control of the machinery. By the time he got well into the strategic hamlet
program he had pretty well abandoned that approach in favor of the more
theoretical elements of the strategic hamlet program, which was an attempt to
re-establish a Vietnamese community from the smallest population grouping, the
hamlet, and develop the leadership and the sense of cohesion in that community
and then build the rest of it up from there. Now you see that is different from
the Can Lao concept.
G: Are you saying then that instead of creating a political
elite from the top down, he was building from the hamlet up?
C: He changed, yes, and was thinking in those terms. Now of course he couldn't
explain it all that well. A lot of the old people--he railed against the old
bureaucrats all the time and complained about them because they really had been
indoctrinated in the French technique of the elite running the place in a kind
of a colonial way. Trying to get across to them that they should stimulate the
growth of a force which would replace them was swimming upstream, obviously.
They could adopt the philosophy of personalism, the earlier approach, a lot
easier than they could the concept of building a whole new elite from the
bottom, from the rural masses particularly, whom they really rejected as
unlettered peasantry, which a great deal of them were. But Nhu saw that they had
to establish this as a real basis for a new Vietnamese society and that was what
preoccupied him. His exhortations went over the heads of most of the colonels
and generals and civil servants that he talked to, but he was convinced if he
just kept pounding at it he would be able to get this thing moving and it would
develop a momentum of its own. He secured Diem's support and interest in the
idea. Diem was always a much more pragmatic fellow--he had great faith in
road-building and practical physical things as bringing about change. Schools,
aid stations, provincial hospitals, things of that nature, industrialization, a
change of some of the agricultural patterns, this is what Diem thought was the
basis for the modernization of Vietnam. So there was a dichotomy between the two
brothers, Diem being the pragmatist and Nhu being the theoretical fellow. I
thought both of them had something to offer, frankly, without having to choose
one or the other.
G: Let me ask you about another personality who is a little shadowy, but he
crops up in important places sometimes. He is, if I have the pronunciation
right, Mai Huu Xuan. Did you have any dealing with him?
C: A bit, yes. Mai Huu Xuan was a general as I remember and took over as head of
the police at sometime during that period, I can't name exactly when. I don't
have a very strong picture of him. I was not all that enthusiastic about him. I
had the impression that he was playing a double or so game. Not with the
communists, but sort of a personal interest, aggrandizement financially and
otherwise. In that way he was really out of tune with what was being worked on.
G: I have heard it asserted that once when Xuan was
recommended to Diem by an American adviser for some post or other, Diem said he
didn't trust Xuan because Xuan had once been in the Sûreté, and he said once in
the Sûreté always in the Sûreté. Have you heard anything [about that]?
C: I don't know. Both Diem and particularly Nhu were very hypersensitive to
French influence. After all, they had fought their way to position against the
French, when the French thought that they could dismiss them and get rid of
them. So they kept seeing French influences here and there, you know, some one
is a French agent, this sort of thing you'd hear all the time. I'm sure some of
it may have been true and I'm sure some of it was a kind of exaggerated
McCarthyism, finding the conspiratorial hand of the French in what otherwise was
explainable by self interest by individuals, by independent action by French
planters and things of this nature, businessmen, without any great guiding hand
of the French government in that sense. The French as a cultural phenomenon in
Vietnam, yes, that was what they were concerned about. They would refer to it as
the French, and they were always very suspicious of that involvement.
G: Did we have any notion or any evidence that there were any
sort of French intelligence activities to speak of?
C: There were French intelligence activities, but I don't think they were any
more complex than our own, I mean a few contacts with various friends that would
give you an independent reading of what's going on, that sort of thing. But as
the French stage-managing the development of Vietnam, no, I didn't have that
sense at all. Actually, of course, the key to Vietnam was that the French had
really supported opponents of Diem during the struggle for power in the
mid-fifties. And he defeated them. They first supported the chief of the army,
and one of Diem's first moves was to fire him, and that caused quite a tremor at
the time. But once he got a hold of the army and his own men in charge of the
army, then he moved against the police, which was the corrupt Binh Xuyen. When
he got those under control, he moved against the various sects, and the French
had connections with all of these, of course, for years. Their technique of
running the colony of Vietnam, which it was, was the usual kind of relationship
with all the different forces in the game, and not having it unify as a
Vietnamese nation because that would get out of their control. So Diem was
correct in being suspicious of the French. I think he found their hand in places
it probably didn't exist. Nonetheless, his problem was right. He had to
establish a Vietnamese nation. The really key element of the Diem role was his
feeling that he had to establish a Vietnamese nation. Otherwise he was always
subordinate to Ho Chi Minh, because Ho Chi Minh had captured nationalism inthe
struggle against the French. Then they had been so impossible to their
non-communist allies, including killing some at various times, that Diem said
that there is a role for the non-communist nationalist. He then wanted to
represent non-communist Vietnamese nationalism. This was frequently the problem
of dealing with Diem, because sometimes he had to assert his independence even
to convince himself that he was independent. Not so much to convince anybody
else sometimes, but to show that he, by golly, was the leader of an independent
Vietnam, dependent upon American support, appreciative of American support, all
that sort of thing, but not subject to puppetry. Of course the communists, the
Vietnamese words they used always were that they were struggling against the My
Diemists, the American Diemists, which to them was all one word. They were
trying to assert that this was just puppetry and that they really did represent
nationalism. This was what the major struggle was about between those two
groups.
G: I want to come back to that issue of Diem's asserting his
independence, because I think it enters the picture a little bit later on in
this series of questions I have here. I think you may have answered almost
directly a question I have about the nature of the insurgency when it became
apparent that there was something more than isolated terrorism going on. There
is an issue involved concerning the origins of insurgency. One school of thought
has it that Hanoi is primarily the engine behind this. Another school says no,
it's southern-inspired, southern-directed, and Hanoi-supported. Is it necessary
to take a position on these?
C: I would say all of the above quite frankly. The point is that obviously there
was a feeling of resistance, of insurgency, rebellion in the countryside against
the French elite who held power in the country, the French-trained,
French-developed, French-culturally attached elite. There was a resistance
against them, and there were abuses by them. There was corruption and things of
that nature by them. So that you say, well, there was a base of rebellion, yes.
Would it have gone anywhere without North Vietnamese assistance? No. It really
would have stuck where it was, as a low level of problems here and there,
localized problems and so forth. It really would not have gotten anywhere. The
key development was the 1960 determination to infiltrate the people who had been
taken to the north. You see, in 1954 a provision of the Geneva Agreement said
that you had three months in which a Vietnamese could choose whether he wanted
to go to the North or the South. Some nine hundred thousand came from North
Vietnam to the South, primarily but not exclusively Catholics. Very little
noticed at the time, some fifty thousand, roughly, went to the North, primarily
young men, taken out of the various networks that had struggled against the
French. They went to North Vietnam. They remained in training camps preparing
for the day to go back to liberate the rest of the country from the My Diemists
now, or the French toadies and puppets, to continue the war.
G: Was this in the nature of a contingency plan, because
didn't the North expect the South to fall like a rotten apple?
C: Yes, and then these people would have moved back to assume the positions of
authority and administration for the country. They would have been southerners
who could relate to the southerners and move back in as the leadership element
of the effort, of the combined nation, of the unified nation.
G: Let me propose a thesis to you. Diem's anti-communist programs between, say,
1954 and 1958, were so effective, it has been said, that the southern
stay-behind communists went to the North and said, "If you don't support an
armed insurgency, we're dead, and we're going to do it whether you're going to
support us or not, because we don't have any choice anymore if we want to
survive. It's that simple." Does that sound at all plausible to you?
C: It could have happened. I'm not sure that the program of the government was
all that efficient, but certainly the communists weren't going anywhere. They
may have gone up to the North and said, "If you don't do something, we are
dead." Because what was really happening was the total social and economic
regeneration of South Vietnam. That's what happened between 1956 and 1959. I
went to little schools out in the country being dedicated down in the swamps of
Ca Mau. This one, I remember going to it, it was way out along the canal and
they were dedicating this new school and it was one of those ceremonies that
there are too many of. I've been through them forever. But the interesting thing
about it was I asked about this little village where the school was. Well, the
village had been evacuated during the period of the war and in about 1952 or
1953 had been just evacuated and everybody gone. About 1957 or 1958 they had
re-established the village and people had moved back to it. Then with the
government program of assistance to schools and training of teachers, they were
re-establishing this school in this little village. It was way out, ten miles,
fifteen miles something, from the provincial capital. I went to the provincial
capital, to the office of education there, after having been there and looked at
their map. You know, they had a comparative map of the number of schools they
had in 1954, which was about two or three, all in the capital or the district
capitals, and the number of schools they had in 1959--this was in the spring of
1959--which was in the order of thirty or forty in the province. Now, that had
happened.
G: Did you verify that?
C: Yes. There's no question about it, that that had happened. In other words,
there was a revival of the economic life. You saw it in the rice production, for
instance, totals, the increase of rice being sold and so forth. A variety of
things of that nature were going on. The land reform that's been criticized, the
land reform did take the land away from the French owners, and very substantial
quantities of it. The program of industrialization, building up a little
industrial zone around Saigon, the program of moving some of the refugees from
the North up into the Highlands and giving them areas to develop and so forth, I
think several hundred thousand actually moved, which had its double effect
because some of the Montagnards didn't like their moving in and that sort of
thing. But nonetheless, the country had an enormous amount of momentum. I
thought that one of the critical things was the election which occurred in I
think about August of 1959 for the National Assembly. This was the second
election. And the question was, what would this election represent? Would it
represent a step toward participation, or would it be a facade operation, just
by rote. It wasn't going to be an American election no matter what, I mean
there's no question about that. You didn't have two parties, couldn't have the
and so forth. But the rather interesting--we got a report one time--I don't know
where we got it, haven't any idea--that the communists were putting out the line
that there are various candidates for these electoral posts. Now let's select
the more liberal of the candidates and throw our support behind him or her as a
step toward getting some influence in the electoral bodies. Not that they would
put their own candidates up under their own names. They wouldn't have been
allowed to, quite frankly. But the question really was whether the communists
were thinking that they had an alternative to move toward an influence on the
political decision-making. Well, the result of the election was that the
government party won 100 per cent of the seats or 99.9 or whatever it was, and
it was just the worst form of manipulated facade. Now, Diem would have won the
election by at least 80 per cent. There's no question about it in my mind at
that time. But particularly his minions all wanted to show that their province
turned in the highest possible percentage, and so they just went out and went
through the motions and so forth. And of course the communists' conclusion out
of this was, no chance. No chance of playing a role, and we're being crushed by
the momentum of the government, by this positive momentum of the economic and
social development that was in the process. And I think that led them to the
decision, we've got to go back to the war. Otherwise we've lost it, and we've
not only lost it in South Vietnam, we may lose it in North Vietnam as well.
Because it was going through its terrible problems of land reform and not
getting anywhere and stagnation and all the rest of it. I think that's
really--now, some people say they were compelled to undertake the fight. Well,
they were compelled if they wanted to take South Vietnam, and that they had no
hope of taking South Vietnam if they let the natural processes go.
G: How were relations between Diem and the American Mission
at the time you arrived?
C: Well, moderate. I go back to my point about his nationalism. He felt that he
had to be the president. He felt that he had to resist the American tendency to
dot every i and cross every t, and that he had to make decisions himself. His
government as a whole was not very efficient, because it was full of the
bureaucrats. Nhu was absolutely right on that. There were some pretty impossible
people there. But nonetheless, it was a typical underdeveloped country trying to
get itself going and trying to develop a new generation of leaders for the
future, and so forth. The Americans are pretty overpowering when they get there
in large numbers and have a major role. I think there was a feeling of the
Vietnamese that they had to somehow distance themselves from the Americans.
G: How many Americans were in country about that time would
you say? Have you got any estimate?
C: I'd say there were--well, they were mostly in Saigon. Let's see, there were
about three or four hundred military, something of that nature. I would say
there were a good two or three hundred in the embassy and probably another five
hundred or more in the AID. So I'd say a good thousand or more, all at a
reasonably high economic level, and occupying essentially the role of the French
governor general and his staff in the earlier days. In other words, to a
Vietnamese the transition was between French and American to some extent,
depending on how we behaved and what our role was. I think this led the
government sometimes to resist us, you know, and struggle against too much
dictation. And of course the American idea would be the only way to solve a
problem, and when the Vietnamese weren't smart enough to do it our way, why
there was something either venal or stupid about the Vietnamese, rather than
searching into why they take the position and helping them to come around to the
right decision, why don't you just see that this is the smart way to do it?
G: A sort of a knack or technique of dealing with people,
which is what's involved?
C: Yes, well, you know, it was written up as the ugly American syndrome. It's a
misnomer of the novel, but nonetheless, it's what it's all about.
G: Was there a difference between Diem's relationship with,
let's say, the ambassador on one hand, and the chief of MAAG [Military
Assistance Advisory Group] on the other?
C: Well, now you get into personalities. The MAAG people normally are quite
supportive of authority and take their orders very straight. Military do; that's
their tradition. And their effort was to strengthen the army, which was
necessary to Diem's survival, and he was very sympathetic. He also saw the value
of having a very supportive American military in their influence in Washington,
and therefore he made particular gestures to the military. The way we set up our
governmental machinery, the CINCPAC command line was independent of the State
Department command line through the ambassador. I happened to disagree with
this, but it's a fact of life. The United States military had a somewhat
autonomous position vis-a-vis government policy and government authority. This
is what changed when Ellsworth Bunker got there later. He made it very clear
that there was only one line of command, and so did [Creighton] Abrams, and so
did [William] Westmoreland. There was no doubt about it in their minds. But in
the earlier days this concept of the separate chain of command did exist and it
created problems. It allowed the Vietnamese to play one off against the other a
bit. Secondly, the civilian approach was focused on economic improvement, the
military on the military, and very few people [were] interested in the political
development. The ambassador's role was to react to the pressures he got from
Washington to try to generate more liberal governmental procedures. The press
began to talk about the corruption and the abuses and so forth, and the
ambassador's role would have to be to try to move the government towards better
imagery in that respect. This then put him in conflict frequently with Diem's
concept that you've got to hold a strong line of authority here, or your whole
thing will come apart. And yes, we're building a new structure and base for our
government, but we're not going to do it next week, and we're not going to do it
by giving it away to some of these liberal opposition groups in the Saigon area
who have no base in the countryside, none, and who are just a pain in the neck
and have no real political force and really don't understand what we're trying
to do in this country in terms of building it and strengthening it. They're
talking about loosening when it needs to be tightened and aimed toward a very
significant objective. This was the philosophical difference between
particularly our political and State Department approach and the Diem and Nhu
concepts.
G: With the benefit of hindsight, would you say that one of
the problems that Diem created for himself in this context was the failure for
some kind of loyal opposition to achieve viability, to sort of defuse dissent?
C: Not really. I think the real problem was that he allowed the negative images
to grow without adequately presenting what his philosophical effort was and what
he was actually accomplishing in the country. Because a more vigorous program of
telling the world, telling lots of the world, what that was about, he didn't do
very well, frankly. It wasn't our role to do for him unfortunately because then
we get in the position of trying to influence our own opinion. That was not our
function and we can't do it and shouldn't do it, but it certainly was a function
that he failed to do very well. Therefore he let the issue grow as to whether
Vietnam was democratic enough, rather than the issue grow as to whether Vietnam
was progressing. Because if the latter had become the main issue, then I think
he would have had support. But there was no way, no way in the world in which he
could retain the necessary authority and go through the liberalization
technique. There are a number of interesting parallels between the fall of Diem
and the fall of the Shah. In both cases the really critical thing is not the
absence of an opposition within the country, it's letting the issue become one
of whether there should be a democratic society there or whether it is making
major progress at the cost of a democratic society. Now this year is the
hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ataturk. Ataturk is generally conceived of
[as] having had a very positive impact on the history of Turkey and the Turks
themselves. He modernized the schools, he took the veils off the women, he took
the fezes off the men, made them wear western clothes, tried to force them.
Exactly what the Japanese did in the Meiji restoration, a total modernization,
forced draft, with some roughness around the edges. Well, that's exactly what
the Shah was doing and did. In fact, the Shah's positive accomplishments in this
field probably outweigh those of Ataturk, in terms of education and social
change, modernization, technological investment and all that sort of thing. And
Diem was engaged in the same program of modernization, in that sense. You really
have the three models. Whether you do it with that kind of
semi-authoritarianism, which was the Shah, Diem, Ataturk, Meiji. Another one is
Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-Kuo in Taiwan, successfully. The South
Koreans, the Japanese, so forth. The second model is the concept of totally
programmed disciplined development. China, North Vietnam, North Korea and so
forth, a little bit Burma, things of that nature. A total disaster. In the range
of history it hadn't worked. And the third is the Indian model of as much
democratic relationship as possible, with the retention of some kind of a
development program, rather dramatized and so forth. They have succeeded in it,
and they're one of the few that has, frankly.
G: What do you ascribe that to?
C: In India?
G: Yes.
C: British background.
G: That's interesting.
C: The British heritage. The heritage of each of the European and Western
nations in Asia is fascinating. In the British colonies you find a good police
force, a concept of law and order, and a concept of--and I mean law as well as
order--and a concept of development in neatness and so forth, a degree of
momentum, and an acceptance of some sharing of power. In the American colony,
ex-colony, the Philippines, you find an enormous success of mass education, a
total focus on a chaotic political structure--which almost brought the country
down before [Ferdinand] Marcos took it over; now the agony of how they're going
to go is very much upon them--and the kind of politic that we have, the politics
of the western states you might say in the 1880s, which are kind of noisy and
there's corruption and violence and all the rest of it, which characterized the
Philippines. And [there is] some good engineering and private investment and so
forth. The Dutch left almost nothing. They took everything they had. The
Belgians in the Congo left three native doctors when they moved out of that huge
country. And the French left some good engineering, a terrible bureaucracy and
good cooks. (Laughter)
G: What about the education system the French left behind?
C: Not much. It was mainly elite-oriented, which is the way French education is
in France. It's heavily elitist-oriented. If you make it, fine, but if you don't
you're down there in the blue collars. And the French educational system was
heavily carried by the Catholic church, and that had its own implication,
because after fifty years of that it was obvious that a high proportion of the
educated elite were Catholic. Even though the Catholics hadn't insisted that you
become a Catholic in order to be trained, there was a natural effect in that
direction. (Interruption)
G: We've discussed Diem's reform, progress-minded activities.
How good were our estimates on such reforms as land reform, the agrovilles and
so on?
C: Well, the land reform worked according to the way most of the successful land
reform programs had worked in the past--the one in Japan, the one in Taiwan,
various others--in which the government took the land from the larger
landowners, and particularly the French, and then loaned the peasant the money,
which he then repaid over the next few years. Now the communists very
intelligently focused on that as just a way of insisting on further payment of
taxes. Because during the intervening years, the years of the war, there were no
taxes collected because the back country was in a turmoil and in an uproar, and
so the peasants weren't paying any taxes. So that the interpretation
successfully put forward by the communists, which was in a sense accurate, was
that this legal mumbo jumbo meant that the peasants would be required to pay
taxes today that they hadn't been required to pay before. Now, we hadn't come
through the thought process that led to the
later land reform program under [Nguyen Van] Thieu, in which the individual was
given the land without a requirement to repay. In other words, we were still
thinking in terms of the Taiwan, the Japanese, and some other models, which had
been successful and certainly were successful in those areas, but hadn't had a
local competition the way the Vietnamese one had.
G: Weren't there charges--perhaps not at the time but
later--that the land reform was really too much of a facade? That landlordism
was still very prevalent?
C: The point there is that whatever the maximum size of holding was set at--I
don't know, let's say a hundred hectares or something like that, I think that's
what it was, which is two hundred and fifty acres, which is quite a lot--too
large. And we went to Diem at one point saying, "Well, you know, you've really
got to cut this down and make it smaller, because there were still landlords and
you still had landlordism." His response was very interesting, as again, the
politics is the art of the possible. He said, "You don't understand, I cannot
eliminate my middle class." When you think of his position at that particular
time, what he was saying was the same decision he made in 1954 to 1956: I'm
going to use the apparatus of social order that exists in order to conduct this
longer-term transition. And I'm not going to dispense with it and try to create
a new one in a hurry. Now the interesting comparison is with Ho Chi Minh, who
moved into Hanoi in 1954 and eliminated every other apparatus of power: the land
reform program, which killed a certain number of the landlords; the bureaucratic
apparatus he threw out and sent down to the South and so forth, but at least he
started with something new. Now he wasn't under attack for the next few years so
he had the period of respite in order to build this new structure of control,
party control. Diem at the time was controlling the precincts of his palace and
not much more when he first started. His problem was how can I get control of
some of these forces that are anarchic and going in all directions? He needed
allies to do it, and he picked up the allies as he went along, including the
bureaucracy and the army and various other things, and put them under his
control. Now by putting them under his control--Nhu explained this very clearly,
he knew exactly what happened--he became a captive of it. Then his policies then
had to be transmitted through these mechanisms, which were not very good. That's
why Nhu used to always be railing about them, but I don't think even Nhu thought
that there was a real alternative. He didn't have the opportunity to create a
new structure ab initio under pressure. Now whether he should have done more of
it in the period of 1956 to 1959, something of that nature, yes, I think
probably they should have. He had his heart set on the National Institute of
Administration, the idea of building--which was advised by our Michigan people
and so forth--a new cadre, an Americanized cadre of governmental bureaucratic
civil servant category, as the French did after World War II when people like
[Valery] Giscard D'Estaing went to the Institute there to become inspectors of
finance, and gradually worked their way up. That's what Diem was in the process
of doing and it just was too slow for the pressures that came on him. So the
answer [is], yes, he should have had a different base of power.
G: But what was there?
C: That's the point. What was there? There wasn't any at that time. He didn't
really have that much alternative, because if he had not reached for those
allies he would have gone down, there's no question about it.
G: Now the communists in the North and in the South always
claimed that their base of power was the peasantry, particularly the landless
peasantry, and I think with a good deal of truth. How did Diem's agroville
program affect the attitude of the peasantry?
C: Well, the agroville--I'm glad you separate the agroville from the strategic
hamlet, because they're two different things. The agroville program was one of
these theoretical programs which might have worked in a different circumstance.
It came about because of the nature of South Vietnam and the Delta area, which
is a whole series of canals and the people live sort of one-by-one along the
canals and stretch out for miles. In 1958 and 1959 when Diem was in this program
of developing schools, aid and marketplaces, just the general social and
economic structure for the country, it was obvious that this was really a tough
thing to handle. How do you handle a school, and particularly a high school, if
people are scattered all over the place? So he had a thought that if he could
move people closer together to make them into agrovilles, still agriculturally
based but in a kind of a city rather than a village or hamlet structure, that
that would give population base for a hospital, a decent administration, a
school system, not only primary but high school system and so forth. And this
looked fine. Move the people together and then give them these amenities, these
steps toward modernization and organizing and so forth. Now of course you
couldn't separate--they depended mainly on their rice growing for their
livelihood. That they could go out to, no great problem. It's only a couple of
miles, no great concern. But they needed something as a plot for vegetables,
things local, a pig or something like that, something they could have for their
family development, aside from the main cash crop out here. So, the consequent
design was--I've forgotten how much, but let's say a hundred square meters or
something like that, which the house was this much and the rest was this garden
patch that they could use. Well, that meant, in other words, that [there were]
ten families a kilometer square. It spreads kind of far. There is still
accumulated enough so that they can support these various economic things. And
in a world in which no opposition had occurred, this would have worked, at least
it might have worked. Let's give it a half and half. It's worth the experiment
and certainly might have brought about these things. The problem was that this
launched in about mid-1959, just about the time the communists were deciding it
was time to resume the rebellion. Well, when you spread this ten families per
kilometer you obviously don't have a defensible center and so an enemy patrol
can walk right through the whole thing and there's no way to put up a perimeter
that will defend that entire area. This was the Achilles heel of the program,
that it came in, would have gotten going about 1960 at exactly the time that the
insurgency was arising and making it fruitless. All this stuff about moving
graves and all the rest of it, sure, that's a part of the problem, but if it had
developed some economic momentum, I suspect it would have overcome that. But
what it couldn't overcome was the deliberate effort to destroy it by the enemy
and the inability to defend it.
G: Was it particularly vulnerable to enemy propaganda as well
as attack?
C: Oh sure, I mean, being moved and so forth. But that sort of thing I think is
something you take as the first stages, and then you demonstrate that there's
something there and you can turn them around. In a later period we went through
the same problem. But by sticking to your program and making it appear that it's
working, people do look and say, "Yes, it does make sense."
G: I'm anticipating here, but it seems to me that are you
saying in fact that you took basically the same idea later in CORDS [Civilian
Operations Revolutionary Development Staff] and made it work?
C: Not the agroville, no, no. Because the agroville thing was indefensible. It
was a little too much the political scientist at work, with a single idea.
That's why I can't say that it would have worked, and I can't say that it would
not have. I just don't know. What the changes were I have no idea. But the fact
is obviously it didn't work and the reason it didn't was its vulnerability. Not
because the other things failed, it was because it was just too vulnerable at a
time when the insurgency began to rise. I don't think it contributed in any
major degree to the rise of the insurgency. I think it had other bases and other
reasons and that it might have worked if it had had a chance. What I am saying
is that we essentially took on the strategic hamlet program later and made it
work, and of course it's my contention that the strategic hamlet program
basically worked the first time. And I know I'm a little contentious about this,
and I know the stories about the fake barbed wire and all that sort of thing,
and sure, so did Diem. We had some internal reports given to him by some
inspectors that he sent out, which were reporting to him the fact that some
provinces were cheating on the figures and that there was abuse of the peasantry
and all the rest of it. This wasn't a surprise to him, that his machinery was
keeping secrets from him, because he had those reports, we know of it. Those are
the problems you have when you take on a major program and try to make it work.
In some places it doesn't work and you go out and tinker with it and fix it.
That's the purpose of having that kind of independent inspection and reporting
and so forth about the vulnerabilities and the abuses and the wrong things that
happened, so that you can correct them. That's the whole idea of the thing. And
the fact that you get these reports doesn't mean that the program is no good. If
you just let it go, yes, then the program is no good. But if you then fix it,
and fire somebody or change the program in some area to match the problem or
whatever, which he was gradually doing.
G: Were we getting those same independent reports?
C: Sure. Yes.
G: Well, why were we accused later of swallowing a lot of
Vietnamese false statistics on such programs?
C: Well, because we love statistics. You know, if we want statistics, they'll
give us statistics. If that's what you want, fine, we'll give them to you. Nhu
was never very much interested in the statistics. He was all lost in the theory
up here, and I thought he made a certain amount of sense in that, in trying to
put the thrust on that. He would have an all-day meeting of all the province
chiefs. I remember being there one time, dragging them in from all over Vietnam
and giving them a long talk for three or four hours. And a lot of them came out
kind of mystified as to what it was all about, which I think had less to do with
his not having a clear idea of what he was doing than their inability to
translate it into the kind of staccato, one, two, three, I put ten strands of
barbed wire and it's all right; if I only put eight it's no good. Because he was
stressing that what you were interested in here was a political movement, a
political action to generate a sense of community on the part of these people,
not to wrap barbed wire around them, but to get them to take a role and a pride
in what they're doing and in participating. I think he was right, and it was
essentially that philosophy that we returned to later, there's no question about
it. We translated from the hamlet to the village. I think that was a mistake in
the Diem-Nhu time, of stressing the hamlet. Because the hamlet was not a
traditional organ of administration. Nhu had that as part of the philosophy. He
didn't want the traditional power apparatus of the village to be running it. He
was forming this new base of power for the whole nation.
G: Do you think that was a mistake?
C: Probably, that he took on more than he needed to at that point. In other
words, he could have left the apparatus of power in the village pretty much
alone so long as he gave it some power, because it has the ability to change and
to refresh itself in a variety of ways. But once you get up to the national
level it's very difficult to do.
G: A lot of critics, I'm sure you're aware, find very great
fault with Diem for removing the local elected village chief.
C: Yes. And I think there--that's why I do think they probably did make a
mistake in that respect.
G: I think Edward Lansdale in his book says that it was done
while he was in country and for one reason or another he was never told or never
found out and says that "you're going to find that incredible and hard to
believe, but it's the simple truth."
C:Yes, well, I wouldn't be surprised. I mean Nhu felt no obligation to get
Lansdale's approval on anything. I mean, sure, he talked to him and so forth,
but he'd make his own decision on a thing like that. As I say, it's this
philosophical reason I think to change the old elite and generate a new
leadership. There was a theoretical idea. It may have been just a little more
than the traffic bore at the time.
G: This is jumping ahead a little bit but it I think is a
good follow-up to that. You mentioned Ataturk and several other models. Other
commentators--I think Walt Rostow is one who says this is a very typical
pattern, where you get an old traditional style of leader in the first
generation of a revolutionary movement, and then the young technocrats take over
in one way or another, Ataturk being the young technocrat. If what Nhu and Diem
were trying to do was create a new elite, is it fair to say that the elite they
were trying to create then turned on them in the form of the army?
C: Well, the army eventually turned on them, but that's another feature. I mean,
we caused that, let's face it. No, I think the weakness was that Diem first
started thinking in terms of creating a new trained elite out of the National
Institute of Administration and so forth. Nhu later turned to this new idea of a
new popular elite coming out of the villages. There's a contradiction between
the two obviously. The beneficiaries of Diem's effort were the elites in the
cities who were able to still be there and not be eliminated as they were in the
North. They certainly turned on Diem, and they turned on him because of an
idealistic feeling that he hadn't made things good enough and that certainly he
had changed the old systems to their detriment, and yet had not solved the
problems by his changes. Then they got intoxicated, some of them, by the idea
that if we just have more democracy everything will be all right. I just don't
think that would have been the case anymore than it was in Chang Myon's Korea in
1960 when the country started to come apart after Syngman Rhee. It was only
rescued by Pak Chung Hee putting it together. I think the same come-apart
phenomenon would have occurred if Diem had been assassinated in 1960. In fact,
he had that revolt against him, parachute attack, and he put it down. He had
enough loyal troops to put it down. It wasn't the army that turned on him; those
were a few excited paratroopers and a few local politicians. I think that he
could control that problem. What he couldn't control later were two things: one,
the forerunner of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Buddhist bonzes that burned
themselves. Because I think that's an exact forerunner, total rejection of the
changes going on, modernization, an idealistic return to some religious base
which, if you ever talk to any of these people you really see that it's all
words and no content. I mean, very, very strange. Then the effect, however, of
the Buddhist thing--again, I'm a little contentious about this because I believe
that the Buddhist revolt, which blew up in June of 1963, had its major impact
not in Vietnam but in the United States. When that picture of the burning bonze
appeared on Life magazine, the party was almost over in terms of the imagery
that was affecting the American opinion. That put enormous pressure on President
Kennedy. "How can you possibly support a government that has people doing this
against it?" [It] led to his vacillation, which is what I have to say it was in
terms of what we should do about this problem, and then led to Diem's forceful
suppression of the Buddhist revolt in the August raids. Frankly, I think he
suppressed them in the same way that he suppressed the sects in 1955. Now, the
problem he couldn't control was the United States reaction. But the Buddhists
were not a factor in September and October. The factor was the difference
between the Americans and the government. It wasn't a matter of the Buddhists
being a major problem in the countryside. They were not a major problem, and he
had not lost the authority of his state. Sure, there were unhappy people, but he
hadn't lost authority and he had been through tough challenges like that before.
The thing that really led to the revolt, of course, was the American signal,
given by President Kennedy, that new personalities would be necessary. Our fight
with them [was whether] to send Nhu and Madame Nhu--who didn't help at all over
here, that's for sure, she had a terrible impact on American opinion--out of the
country and Diem's refusal to knuckle under, as he would have said it, to
American domination on that issue, and to demonstrate in part his independence
and his belief that the Americans were wrong. [Diem had] the genuine feeling
that the Americans were making a mistake and it was up to him to struggle hard
enough against them to prevent them from doing so. Then that led to the big
fight in Washington that occurred all that summer as to whether we'd go with
President Diem or think of replacing him--you know as much about that as I
do--and eventually ended up with a few signals by the administration, a
statement by President Kennedy, suspension of our commercial import program, the
assurances to the generals that we would be prepared to resume it if they moved
against the government.
G: What was the generals' original complaint against Diem?
C: That he was creating such confusion in his programs and in his policies that
he was risking American support of Vietnam against the communists. That was
their fundamental feeling, that he was going to lose the war because the
Americans were going to back away.
G: I see. It's been contended that they were saying he was
botching the effort against the communists, rather than alienating the
Americans.
C: Right. Those are the two arguments. I mean, you can pay your money and take
your choice. But the one argument was that his policies, particularly vis-a-vis
the Buddhists and the authoritarian nature of the regime, was antagonizing the
people, therefore giving encouragement to the communists to develop more support
among the people and therefore threatening the future of Vietnam, and that we
could never hope to win the war against the communist attack with Diem. A lot of
very sincere people believed that. The other argument was that the countryside
was essentially unaffected by the whole Buddhist struggle and that in fact the
programs of the countryside were going along. I happen to think that that is a
little exaggerated because I think the really critical thing that happened was
the outburst of the Buddhist revolt, which turned the attention of the palace
away from the strategic hamlet program, which until that time had been quite
successful, but required an enormous amount of palace attention and stimulus and
drive. When the Buddhist thing blew up and then the fight with the Americans
developed, all of that stimulus and drive had to be diverted onto the other
problems. The program was let lag at exactly the time when the communists had
identified it as a major threat, in the spring of 1963, and had instructed their
people that they were to destroy this program at all costs, because it really
did threaten them strategically. So they began to attack it in about June or
July, and you can see the terrorist incidents grow at that time against it. One
interpretation is that this was a reflection of the disenchantment with Diem.
The other is that it was an expression of communist strategic focus on a
dangerous program. I take the communist direction as the key element. I know
these are arguable, and I don't mind. But the fact was that they wouldn't have
had a revolt if the United States had not encouraged it. There was no doubt
about that whatsoever. I think it's the greatest mistake we made. I know Mr.
Johnson also thought it was a terrible mistake, but vice presidents don't have
much power.
G: This is speculative, of course, but do you think in the
face of the opposition Diem was experiencing from the Buddhists and the unrest
in the army and so forth, could he have been sustained through that crisis?
C: Oh, yes. Yes. If the Americans had maintained their commitment, their
support, no doubt about it. But when the Americans indicated a change, then
bing, it was gone, it went.
G: Where does this put Roger Hilsman?
C: Well, I think Roger and some of the others, and [Averell] Harriman I
disagreed with on various [things] at times--I just think their assessment of
the problem, of the nature of the problem, and the policies that we followed
were mistaken. Now I must admit that they weren't entirely free in that because
they had a lot of pressure behind them from the American people and the American
press. That's why I say, when that picture appeared in Life magazine, the game
was almost over. Because we do have a government which has to reflect strong
attitudes by the American people. That certainly had a strong element, a strong
impact on the situation. Now I'm not one of those who believes that you can
ignore the American people. You cannot. You've got to listen to them. You've got
hopefully to educate them as to what the reality of the problem is, but they are
the ultimate repositories of power, and when they decide something it's done.
And it was done with Diem on that image, and it was done with Vietnam on the Tet
image.
G: A case in point perhaps--
C: It's a bad way to make decisions maybe, but nonetheless, it's part of our
government system.
G: That's going to lead us into an interesting discussion on
the role of the media, I think. I don't know whether we'll get to it. An
interesting, I think, case in point, and I'd be interested in your evaluation of
it, was the raid on the Xa Loi pagoda in August, which brought a lot of things
to a head.
C: Sure.
G: Nhu, or Diem, whoever was operating, apparently used
Vietnamese special forces to suppress a focus of Buddhist discontent, and the
press made a great deal out of this, because it was well known that they were
CIA-supported, advised, whatever.
C: --supported, yes.
G: Did we know about this in advance?
C: No. No.
G: How was a person like--or why, I should say, was a person
like David Halberstam supposedly informed ahead of time and we didn't know?
That's raised a bone of contention.
C: I didn't realize he says he was informed ahead of time.
G: Well, not much ahead of time, I think a day or so ahead of
time.
C: I never heard that statement either. Oh, frequently newspapermen get a tip on
things that the government doesn't get. The fact that we have an adviser with a
unit doesn't mean that we're privy to every order they get. I mean, when Pak
Chung Hee moved into Seoul in 1961, some of the American advisers almost were
with the unit, not realizing what they were involved in. You know, you're a
foreigner and the orders come down that chain. We didn't have resident advisers
with every battalion or whatever structure. It wasn't a very large force anyway,
it was a small force. They could have easily used them and told them to go do
something without telling us, and probably would have, because they knew we
would have objected. You see, in the raid on the pagodas, Diem I think came to
the conclusion that he had to suppress the Buddhists. As I said earlier, I think
he succeeded. But he came to the conclusion that they were not just a religious
force, but a political force that was attacking the authority of his state, and
he had no choice but to suppress them. He used the special forces, because he
happened to have them, they were handy and easy and he didn't have to explain
them to a whole general staff or anything, just reach out and tell them to do
it.
G: Didn't he make an effort, or someone make an effort, to
pin this on the ARVN rather than on the special forces?
C: Well, that was the fuss that we got into afterwards. I think, as I remember
it, the question was whether the army had participated in it. They had army
uniforms on. And then the army had always been unhappy about the special forces
having a separate line of command to Nhu's structure. That's why they eventually
shot Colonel [Le Quang] Tung in the most outrageous murder of all, frankly. A
very mild, straightforward, decent guy. But the army then, with the reaction,
you see, of the Americans to this, the army insisted this wasn't army. [Henry
Cabot] Lodge took this point up and made something of it, and at a time when we
were building our contacts with the army and wanted to maintain that option of
the army, then that became important. You see, quite obviously Diem and Nhu took
the interregnum between [Frederick] Nolting, that they did respect and realized
that he was losing the battle of supporting them and had been kicked out
obviously and replaced by Lodge, who was a very unknown quality at that point.
They didn't know which way he'd go. They thought they'd take the interregnum
between those two ambassadors and just eliminate the Buddhist thing and present
Lodge with a fait accompli, that it had been eliminated, wasn't there anymore.
Well, Lodge is not one that takes that kind of a gesture lightly and this
affecte his entire attitude towards him.
G: Did Lodge interpret that as a challenge, an insult
perhaps?
C: No, it--well, that they deliberately had acted before he got there in order
to just do away with the Buddhist problem before they had the problems of
dealing with him.
G: That brings up an interesting point concerning the--
(Interruption) There is an interesting series of blank spots and conjectures
concerning their relationship right before the coup, between Lodge and General
[Paul] Harkins, the MAAG chief, and Mr. [John] Richardson, the station chief of
CIA. Can you sort that out?
C: Well, Lodge came out to Vietnam having been chosen, as the former vice
presidential candidate for the Republicans in 1960, by President Kennedy, in
order to de-politicize our problems in Vietnam and get the Republicans on the
hook as well as the Democrats. As I said, this challenge to his authority by
Diem and Nhu affected Lodge's entire approach. Harkins, in the MAAG position,
was convinced that the war was going relatively well, not perfectly, but moving
along. The programs actually working of improving the armed forces and the
strategic hamlet program seemed to be in the right direction and so forth, and
that the Buddhist problems were some political thing that were off in a corner
and shouldn't affect our main interest in the support of the South Vietnamese
and the war effort. Richardson, by direction and by tradition, was in direct
touch with Nhu, had talked to Nhu over the, what, year and a half since I'd
left, and had a frank relationship with him, understood what he was talking
about and trying to do, and basically sympathized with the concept of a
political, hamlet-based solution to the insurgency problem. That we also
shouldn't be diverted by the urban, religious problems from our main interest in
the major challenge to our interests there, which was from the North. Lodge came
in with much more of a sense of the American reaction to the Buddhist problems
and the intensity of feeling in the United States, much more aware of the sharp
difference of opinion within the administration as to what ought to be done, and
probably a little better informed about President Kennedy's basic thinking, that
something had to be done about Diem and Nhu. So he came in after the raid on the
pagodas, determined to distance himself from and distance the United States from
total identification with Diem and Nhu. This, of course, conflicted with
Richardson and Harkins' view of what was important and what was the significant
element of the problem, which was the countryside problem. This led eventually
to his dismissing Richardson in order symbolically to indicate the end of the
relationship with Nhu. Because Diem was not yielding to Lodge's demands, and
they were demands. Diem was not yielding to those demands. The chemistry between
the two didn't work at all. One of the more wry aspects was one of Lodge's first
cables when he got there, and he went to some ceremony at the palace. Diem had
appeared in a traditional Vietnamese mandarin's coat, and I guess the other
people there, too. Diem, for a long time, had adopted the sort of French white
sharkskin suits that all the bureaucrats did, and then increasingly he turned to
putting on a traditional Vietnamese costume. Lodge's cable is rather amusing
because it talks about the medieval court with all its connotations. Of course,
the really fascinating thing was that when Lodge finally left Vietnam about a
year and a half later, he put on a Vietnamese costume for the final ceremony--
G: Lodge did? That's interesting.
C: --at which he was given the National Order. The contradiction between the two
has never really been explained. I mean, Lodge was a very strong-minded, a very
forceful fellow, but. . . . As I say, the chemistry was never going to work in
the circumstances unfortunately. The other thing is that Lodge did not conceive
his role as being the manager of the American effort. He conceived his role as
being an individual sent out to make his observations and make his contribution.
As a result he did not try to manage the American team in that sense and assert
his authority--it sort of went its different ways.
G: Was there a manager below?
C: Well, Truehart was there, but if the ambassador isn't going to insist on
authority nobody else really can successfully do so.
G: That brings up a story that I have encountered in another
context, and that is that following the Diem coup--I think it's in
December--Secretary McNamara went to Saigon on one of many visits and came back
and reported that in fact there had not been leadership of the country team, as
it were, but that he had great hopes for a young man named David Nes, who was
going to act as a coordinator at the second echelon level. And about a month
later David Nes got the sack. Do you know anything about that story?
C: I don't remember, but I think it was a question of whether Nes was posing
some threat to Lodge's basic authority. I don't know the story, but I think that
was the guesswork.
G: I've heard the same thing. That's as far as it goes.
C: See, the history of the American effort in Vietnam was a continuing agonizing
effort to get the Americans organized for the nature of the war we were in. We
went through all these awful problems of the struggle between the military and
the civilians, and the different civilian agencies and all the rest of it. We
actually put the strategic hamlet program under pretty good management when we
sent a fellow named Phillips--
G: Rufus Phillips?
C: Ruf Phillips, Ruf Phillips there to run the American support of the program.
While we didn't unify the military side of it, it really wasn't all that
relevant at the time and it wasn't a major problem. Then, of course, we got into
the total confusion of the whole coup and the post-coup. That was just anarchy.
Then we tried a series of experiments to at least get the civilian Americans
organized. Bill Porter went out there and various other people. That sort of
moved it a little bit. It wasn't until President Johnson put Bob Komer in to
"damn it, get this civilian side of the thing organized," that he came up with
the answer. Secondly, they sent Ellsworth Bunker out there to be the
commander--Ellsworth took charge, no doubt of it. Komer had the brilliant
solution of unifying the civilian and military countryside effort under a
military command. That solved all the problems. That the military had a unity of
command, but the civilians had their own role in it and the joint organization
and all the rest of it. It worked. But it wasn't until President Johnson finally
made that [decision and] put a guy with Bob's enthusiasm and drive into the role
that it eventually worked.
G: I've seen two schools of thought also on the effect of the
coup on the communists, not just the communists, the NLF, which is the more
inclusive term, I think. One view is that militarily the Viet Cong made great
strides taking advantage of the confusion and the falling apart of the strategic
hamlet program and so on. Another view is that politically the NLF lost its
focus for a while because it no longer had Diem as a symbol of everything that
was wrong. It was no longer the only anti-government game in town; there were
lots of anti-government games you could join if you wanted to play.
C: That's interesting.
G: And that about a third of the members of the NLF went
inactive or simply quit in the aftermath of the--not in the aftermath, in the
summer during the Buddhist troubles, and for sometime thereafter the NLF lost
considerable numbers, not necessarily fighters.
C: I have heard that interpretation. I would say that the effect on the NLF and
the communists generally--well, one communist diplomat, I think he was a North
Vietnamese, but he was part of the whole business or NLF, one or the other, said
they just looked with absolute amazement at the fact that the Americans threw
Diem out, couldn't understand it. Secondly, there was a surge of attacks to
destroy the strategic hamlet program, which of course the new government
couldn't identify with anyway. So they did take advantage of that period of
confusion, and period of very weak leadership under the junta, Duong Van Minh
particularly. His only decisive act was to decide to kill Diem and Nhu.
G: Do you think that was Minh's decision?
C: Oh, personally, yes, without any doubt. In fact, the other generals I think
were shaken by it.
G: Who do you think pulled the trigger, or is that important?
C: That fellow that was killed later.
G: Xuan?
C: Yes. Yes, whatever his name was. Because when [Nguyen] Khanh got in he just
took him out and shot him. I think--there's no doubt about it, Xuan killed him.
There's no doubt about that he was Minh's aide and that he acted on Minh's
orders, no question about it. The other generals then were faced with a fait
accompli. They couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again unfortunately. But
then they floundered around for three months and the place was coming to pieces
and Khanh moved and took over. But the communists were not, interestingly
enough, equipped to exploit the confusion to the degree that they should have
been. In other words, they did not have the structure, the size force, either
political or military, which would enable them to move into that period of
vacuum. And so after a surge to get rid of the strategic hamlets and this great
new world that's opening up, then the rather grinding business of the day
resumed and the military in the countryside just sort of toughened up and said,
"well, we've got to fight these guys, keep on fighting them." The communists,
NLF, continued their effort. And it did take them a little while to rejigger
their political line, but it didn't take long. I don't recall that as being any
great problem.
G: I noticed in researching documents that--the ones that I
have at least--show a focus on political matters of the CIA cables coming out of
Saigon immediately after the coup. And it has been speculated that this was
because the CIA's jurisdiction, if you will, in military matters had been taken
away. Or was this simply a question of priorities?
C: This was priorities. The main problem was the political thing of whether they
could put something together. The countryside reporting had been taken over in
great effect by the military. I mean, they had the province teams by then, I
don't know, maybe not. They had theater teams. And a lot of the statistical
stuff of numbers of incidents and stuff like that, that flowed in through the
mission and was available to CIA, but they didn't report it as something they
discovered or found. I'm sure that the CIA cables said something about the war
and how it was going at that time. But you're right, it did focus very heavily
on the problems of the politics of the junta and then Khanh and then the
Buddhists and all the other actions that were going on there. Because that was
the name of the game.
G: What responsibility did the CIA retain after I think it's
called Operation Switchback, for reporting on things like order of battle and so
forth?
C: Well, it wasn't Operation Switchback that did that. You always had a military
intelligence component to MAAG. They got the statistics from the Vietnamese
military. The CIA would get some statistics from the police, but the military
were more comprehensive on the military actions and fighting problems and so
forth. The Switchback merely got CIA out of an action responsibility with
respect to the CIDGs [Civilian Irregular Defense Groups] and the northern
operations and things like that.
G: Operational programs?
C: Yes, the operations. They didn't change their function. But CIA never felt
that it was its job to provide comprehensive statistical reporting. That was the
Mission's. Its job was to try to develop some useful sources in both the
government, the opposition elements, and to the extent feasible using the police
and the intelligence structures, civilian intelligence structures, to get into
the communist side. And then of course after Switchback we in theory got out of
the whole action area and then, oh, six months or a year later it was obvious
that the place was coming apart and that we needed local forces and local
political counter-insurgency kinds of forces. CIA began to come up with some of
those and got the approvals to support them and get them going. That was the RD
[Revolutionary Development] cadre and some of the other programs.
……………………
Then, of course, the really important mission, though, was the Taylor-Rostow
one, in October or something like that. It came over for about three of four
days. Unfortunately I was not there. I had been called over to Manila to meet
John McCone, our new director of CIA. I had just come back and had about a
half-hour talk with Rostow, and that's all. I've always kind of regretted that,
because I had the feeling that the Taylor-Rostow mission, in its report that
eventually showed up, did not put an adequate stress on the importance of the
strategic hamlet, the village level of the war, the whole counterinsurgency
role, but instead really started us off on what I thought was the wrong foot, of
focusing particularly on the military and the strengthening of the military.
G: And pressures against the North for a possible--
C: Well, and all that stuff about the North, which was kind of incidental. We'd
already been doing a little of that, but I was in the process of becoming
disenchanted with it as not being very feasible.
G: These were what, black operations?
C: Yes. Dropping people in and so forth. I guess we ran our first ones in 1960,
so it was before that. But--
G: Hadn't Lansdale trained some teams way back in the middle
fifties?
C: Oh, some of his people had theoretically left some capabilities up in Hanoi
when they went away, but no, it played no role at that time. Lansdale was more
symbolic. He was looking for the symbolism and the political effect of this, and
not unreasonably. Some of his ideas are a little fey once in a while, but he did
understand the basic political quality that was necessary to any continuing
struggle. But the Taylor-Rostow thing I thought really missed the point at the
time. I really was always sorry that I hadn't had more of a chance to get to
them on it. I don't know why. I don't know whether it would have made any
difference, but I didn't. They kind of dismissed the CIA as, well, you get off
and do a little of that intelligence work, and that's all. I thought that the
CIA at that particular point had figured out some of the things about what the
nature of the war was all about. Particularly a few of the experiments in the
villages where we'd armed some of the local tribesmen or local citizens in the
Delta or up the coast or up in the mountains or some place.
G: How did Diem feel about arming the population as opposed
to arming something like the self-defense force?
C: He was a little suspicious of it, but Nhu convinced him that it was a good
thing. And they didn't just wander through the back countryside and throw the
guns out the back of the trucks. I mean--Diem of course had no hesitation in
arming a Catholic community because he had confidence that they would fight, and
they did. There's no question about it. But he went along with the effort up in
the tribal areas and he went along with some of the other programs, which were
more experimental than anything. We deliberately conducted them as experiments,
and then tried to demonstrate to Nhu the things that had worked and the things
that hadn't about them, and that the key to it was the local leadership and the
local sense of responsibility. I think he got a lot of the strategic hamlet out
of some of those experiments. Then he broadened it and applied it, and then he
put the philosophical gloss on top of it. We certainly made mistakes in some
parts of it. I don't have any doubt about that. But as an identification of the
correct strategy for that kind of a war, I think that the CIA people were on the
right track at that time, and that the Taylor-Rostow mission went in the wrong
direction.
G: That, of course, nearly confirms a question I think I had
asked on the handout, which was, is it too much to say that you think the CIA
had the secret to winning the war and didn't get a chance to apply it?
C: Well, I covered this in my book a little bit, that there is an inherent
problem here, that CIA is an agency whose machinery works through secret
channels. And you can't really win a war secretly. So somehow we had to figure
out--and it took us a long time to do so--how to organize a proper political
counterinsurgency effort outside of CIA, with CIA playing a role. Now eventually
we came to it with CORDS, but it took us about five years to figure out the
structure. In the five years we went through all sorts of noise and confusion
unfortunately. But as a strategy, yes, I think there's no question about it,
that the strategy of focusing on the village level of the war, encouraging the
participation and activating the local population to play a role, was the key to
the nature of the war that they were facing. And the strategic hamlet program--I
don't care about little variations in the programs, I mean, village, hamlet,
things like that are minor variations against the basic philosophy--did work in
1962. Wilford Burchett said it did, and he's no friend.
G: That's quite a compliment.
C: And it did work in 1969, 1970 and 1971 once we got at it again. And when we
chased around in other areas it didn't work.
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