Esau’s Birthright: The Sino–Soviet Split
Mao felt that Khrushchev’s disparagement of Stalin’s reputation merely served the interests of global imperialism. He argued that Stalin’s legacy needed cool assessment, so that the 20 or 30 per cent bad could be separated from the 80 or 70 per cent good. ‘Stalin is a sword,’ he said. ‘It can be used to fight imperialism and various other enemies . . . If this sword is put aside completely, if it is damaged, or if it is abandoned, the enemies will use the sword to try to kill us. Consequently, we would be lifting a rock only to drop it on our own feet.’ Khrushchev replied that the sword was completely useless and should be abandoned.
Compared with the two-month wait he had endured in 1949, Mao was lavished with attention when he paid his second, and last, visit to Moscow in November 1957 on the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. He was housed in a palace of Catherine the Great, but slept on the floor rather than in her bed. Hidden microphones picked up Mao’s private comments on his hosts, which were withering. Dismissing Khrushchev’s belief in peaceful coexistence with the West, Mao said: ‘If worse came to worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain, while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the world would become Socialist.’1
Mao’s psychopathy surged to a new level when he launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958. Detailed research by Frank Dikötter has established that fifty-five to sixty-five million people perished in this dystopian effort to surpass British industrial output within fifteen years. Even China’s sparrows were not safe from this relentless venture, for they pecked away at grain and had to be kept airborne until they dropped dead by villagers banging pots through the night.2 Foreign relations were not spared the general hysteria; indeed, they may have been integral to it. This was the year when the Soviets sought to install their communications system for submarines operating in the northern Pacific on Chinese soil, offering the Chinese, who wanted to have their own submarine fleet, what Mao dismissed as a ‘military co-operative’. Mao’s response to the Soviet Ambassador was so rude that Khrushchev hastened in person to Beijing, where discussions with the Chinese leader went from bad to worse: ‘The British, Japanese, and other foreigners who stayed in our country for a long time have already been driven away by us, Comrade Khrushchev. I’ll repeat it again. We do not want anyone to use our land to achieve their own purposes any more.’ There was rivalry even when the two relaxed. While Khrushchev bobbed nervously in a rubber ring in the shallow end of Mao’s pool, the Chinese leader ploughed back and forth like a porpoise, demonstrating his mastery of various strokes, while keeping up a stream of talk translated into Russian by poolside interpreters.
Mao gave his guest no warning that he was about to embark on his own challenge to US Pacific hegemony. He was quite explicit about the ‘social imperialist’ agenda: ‘a tense international situation could mobilize the population, could particularly mobilize the backward people, could mobilize the people in the middle, and could therefore promote the Great Leap Forward in economic construction’. In other words, Mao was going to incite Chinese chauvinism.3
On 23 August 1958 the People’s Liberation Army rained 30,000 artillery shells in one hour on the Kuomintang-controlled island of Jinmen (Quemoy) off the mainland, killing 600 of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. The US responded, as they were obliged to do under the 1954 defence treaty with Taiwan, with a massive naval build-up in the Taiwan Straits and the deployment of 200 aircraft. With the US threatening war, Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko rushed to Beijing, where Mao explained that his intention was to lure the Americans into an ‘iron noose’. Gromyko was appalled when Mao amplified his strategy. If the Americans were to use nuclear weapons or invade China, the PLA would retreat into the interior, drawing US forces after them. At that point, the Kremlin should ‘use all means at its disposal’ to destroy them. Gromyko flatly told him that such support would not be forthcoming. His main object of having the Americans and Russians ‘dancing and scurrying’ about over two miserable little offshore islands achieved, Mao allowed tension to subside.
In view of Mao’s cavalier attitude towards nuclear warfare, it was not surprising that the Soviets found excuses not to give Communist China a prototype nuclear bomb and related blueprints as they had agreed to do in October 1957. Further tearing noises were heard, as we have seen, during the Sino–Indian conflict. In September 1958 Khrushchev arrived in Beijing for the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Chinese Revolution, to find no reception party at the airport and no microphone for his carefully prepared arrival speech. At the formal reception, he lectured his hosts on the need for a relaxation of international tensions, and chided them for the recklessness of their recent ventures in the Taiwan Straits and on the Sino-Indian border. The meetings between Chinese and Russians degenerated into insults, so the Russians cut short their scheduled week of talks and left. Shortly afterwards Moscow slashed aid to Beijing, which enabled Mao to blame the Soviet ‘revisionists’ for the failings of his Great Leap Forward. China increasingly regarded the Soviets as part of the problem rather than the solution, and themselves as the torchbearers of the insurgent Third World.
The CIA’s Sino–Soviet Studies Group, set up in 1956, produced a series of ‘Esau studies’, named after the biblical figure duped out of his birthright by his brother Jacob, which analysed the rift in the making. Agency analysts developed what amounted to heretical views at a time when the prevailing orthodoxy was of a monolithic Communist bloc pursuing common objectives. Those who stressed the role of national differences in Communist parties were accused of having ‘nineteenth-century minds’, to which they retorted that it was an improvement on having minds locked into the thirteenth century. Bureaucratic caution and suspicions that the split might itself be a ‘Commie plot’ explain why it took time for these views to feed into policy-making. Among those most sceptical were Eisenhower, Nixon and the CIA’s future chief John McCone.
It was not until 1960 that the views of the heretics found their way into the National Intelligence Estimates that the CIA prepared for the NSC, and not until about two years later that State Department officials accepted this new international reality.4 By early 1962, when 60,000 Muslim Uighars fled Xinjiang for neighbouring Kazakhstan, the Chinese accused Moscow of having suborned them through ‘subversive activities’. Moscow replied that since 1960 Chinese troops had flouted the borders, and warned of an ‘extremely decisive response’. This was where things were tending. What might have led to a shift in US foreign policy ten years before the Nixon–Kissinger opening to China in 1971–2 was put on hold because the Soviets and Chinese seemed to be co-operating in supporting North Vietnam’s war against the South. Despite the fact that Vietnamese national identity had been shaped by a thousand years of implacable resistance to the Chinese, the US saw Hanoi as just a proxy of Beijing, and the Vietnamese civil war as a replay of Korea.5
Why Vietnam?
As a senator, John Kennedy had repeatedly advertised his support for South Vietnam. It was, he said, in a flurry of mixed metaphors that we have already quoted, ‘the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike’.6 In his inaugural address JFK spoke grandiloquently of Americans as ‘watchmen on the walls of freedom’. An activist style swept through Washington, as the ‘best and the brightest’ moved into their new posts, many of them armchair tacticians and professorial warriors, over-fond of modish social-science modernization theory. For all their conceit about being new brooms, they were mental prisoners of the faith that appeasement had brought about the Second World War, and of the post-war belief in a domino theory that refused to recognize the nationalist fissures in supposedly monolithic international Communism.
A few sceptics reported, from the inside, that much of the administration’s relentless activism was pointless. ‘We are like the Harlem Globetrotters, passing forward, behind, sidewise, and underneath. But nobody has made a basket yet,’ wrote the new National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy at the time. Bundy had been brought in from Harvard, where he was a senior academic manager.7 Although there was an emphasis on youth, a kitchen crowded with young chefs had to accommodate such oldies as Acheson, Averell Harriman and even Douglas MacArthur, for a huge range of advice was solicited, often to no obvious purpose.
Wider events favoured doing something about Vietnam. In their pre-inaugural briefing sessions Eisenhower had underscored the importance of Laos, which JFK insisted on pronouncing Lay-os to avoid the homonym with Louse. He initiated negotiations that included the Pathet Lao over the future of Laos, but until July 1962 Harriman’s diplomatic efforts in Geneva proved sterile. In any case the principal conflict was in South Vietnam, where the National Liberation Front (Viet Minh) swelled with southerners returning from training in the North from 10,000 guerrillas in January 1961 to 17,000 by October. It was not essential to make a stand in South Vietnam even if the assumptions about monolithic Communist aggression and falling dominoes were right. The line might as easily have been drawn around SEATO ally Thailand.8
As part of his creed of flexible response, JFK preferred to fight the war indirectly. The US Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) in Saigon received 500 extra personnel, the US having long exceeded the 685 permitted under the 1954 Geneva Accords.9 Four hundred freshly minted Special Forces operators in their green berets were sent to train the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) to conduct hit-and-run raids across the 17th parallel dividing North from South.
The CIA accelerated covert operations in Laos. Using such codenames as Operation Momentum, CIA officers organized and trained 9,000 Hmong tribesmen, whom the Americans ignorantly called Meo, which meant something like ‘native’ or ‘nigger’ in Chinese. The aim was to use the fiercely anti-Vietnamese tribesmen to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was becoming the major Viet Minh supply route, snaking along the border inside Laos. Supplies were flown into remote jungle landing strips by such colourful Air America pilots as ‘Weird Neil’ Houston, while the base chief, Tony Po, lived in a house adorned with strings of ears the Hmong had separated from severed Pathet Lao and Viet Minh heads.10
While these limited measures bought time, they did not address how the US might respond if the Diem regime collapsed. Some hawkish members of the administration – such as the Deputy Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Walt Rostow – wanted air and naval operations against North Vietnam, accompanied if necessary by US boots on the ground in the South. An ambitious Polish-Jewish academic from MIT, Rostow had been a target identifier in the Second World War. His enthusiasm for bombing led to his being known as ‘Air Marshal Rostow’. A major obstacle to boosting the US presence was President Diem himself, described as ‘a weak, third-rate Catholic bigot’ by one senior State Department official. While Diem wanted the cornucopia of US aid to continue, he was wily enough to realize that an overt US military presence – involving an autonomous command – would unify his many domestic opponents and give the Communists a powerful propaganda lever against him.
A major difficulty the new administration faced was getting an accurate picture of conditions in Vietnam, on which to build costly nation-building projects – manufactured from turgid sociology and a false analogy with civil engineering. That was why so many high-powered visitors were regularly sent there, for what in reality amounted to guided tours around Potemkin villages. On 5 May 1961 JFK sent Vice President Lyndon Johnson on a tour of Asia, with a key stop in Saigon. As his huge motorcade struggled into the capital Johnson stepped out to dispense pens, lighters and complimentary passes to the US Senate gallery, as he would have in Texas. In public he referred to Diem as ‘the Winston Churchill of Asia’. In private conversations, this master of innumerable ‘knee to knee’ negotiations in the US Senate, where he had been majority leader, found Diem impossible to pin down. ‘He was tickled as hell when I promised him forty million dollars and talked about military aid, but he turned deaf and dumb every time I talked about him speeding up and beefing up some health and welfare projects.’
Reporting to JFK on return from his tour, Johnson stressed that the free nations of Asia took a poor view of the search for a Laotian compromise. Diem himself was badly shaken by US willingness to negotiate with the Pathet Lao. Johnson added that support for Diem ‘must be made with the knowledge that at some point we may be faced with the further decision of whether we commit major United States forces . . . I recommend we proceed with a clear cut and strong program of action.’11 Yet Johnson also conjured up the spectre of US troops ‘bogged down chasing irregulars and guerrillas over the rice fields and jungles of Southeast Asia while our principal enemies China and the Soviet Union stand outside the fray and husband their strength’. This encapsulated the essential problem: JFK could neither withdraw nor escalate.12
Subsequent policy discussions were interminable and fractious. Many experts on Europe regarded the entire South-east Asian region as a bad joke, including doves like George Ball and the hawk Dean Acheson. Civilian and military hawks alike saw a massive Soviet and Chinese threat to the whole of South-east Asia, and wanted to deter it through escalating US responses to a series of pre-calibrated trip wires. Rostow recommended ground troops in Laos and air strikes against North Vietnam in retaliation for increased Viet Minh activity. JFK even consulted old MacArthur, who warned that Americans were useless at guerrilla warfare and should avoid it. America’s SEATO allies were unenthusiastic about intervention in South-east Asia, and only Thailand would be of much help on the ground. What did Pakistan or the Philippines care about Vietnam?
On 17 October Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor were despatched to Saigon to report, once again, on conditions on the ground and the durability of Diem’s regime. Maxwell Taylor spoke French and was known to liberals as the ‘good’ General, perhaps because he had recently headed the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The two men landed during the worst floods in living memory, with much of the Mekong Delta under water and many of the inhabitants stranded on their roofs. The Viet Cong abducted and murdered a prominent army liaison officer just to remind the arriving American who was really boss.
South Vietnam seemed to Taylor to be undergoing ‘a collapse of national morale’. Hidden in a cloud of cigarette smoke, Diem talked at Taylor for over four hours, although Taylor was fortunate here since Diem could often manage ten hours when he got into his stride. He insisted on more US aid while denying his visitors the ability to form their own opinion about what was needed. He also wanted extra US advisers to train a further 100,000 troops. When Taylor met General Duong Van Minh, who as ‘Big Minh’ notionally commanded the field army, Minh bitterly criticized Diem for permitting arrangements in which political concerns subverted the army chain of command. Thus Diem loyalist General Nguyen Khanh seemed to have more power than Lieutenant-General Le Van Ty, the Chief of the Joint General Staff, while civilian political bosses gave orders to the troops in their areas. There seemed to be seven intelligence agencies, none of them doing much to defeat the Viet Cong.
In the end, Taylor decided that it was the best of a series of bad options to stick with Diem. Fatefully, he recommended using the floods as an excuse to introduce a small number of US troops, notionally to lend Diem’s forces logistical support, but also to lay the foundations for whatever larger US presence might eventually be judged necessary.13
Intelligence experts warned that for each added US contribution, the Communists would respond in kind. They were ignored. There was no discussion of the implications of the Sino–Soviet split, nor of how North Vietnamese support for southern revolutionaries related to Moscow and Beijing, nor of international law on countering aggression of the kind that had justified the UN-mandated US intervention in Korea. Moreover, although the visiting Americans could not fail to comment on Diem’s deficiencies, which State Department officials tirelessly emphasized, they never addressed one crucial dilemma: if the US took over running the war it would be vilified around the world for neo-colonialism; if it merely continued to advise Diem, there was the dangerous prospect of the tail wagging the dog, or at least a fruitless cycle of mutual deception and manipulation.14
While the administration procrastinated about ends, the US ‘advisory’ presence mushroomed. The Saigon CIA station under William Colby from 1959 until 1961 – when he took over the Far Eastern Affairs desk – and his successor John Richardson became a huge operation, with housing, facilities and pay deeply resented by the embassy staff. When Richardson and his wife Ethyl took up residence in a big villa on a leafy street, they found that they could not hire servants. With that attention to local nuance so representative of American officials abroad, they had not appreciated that the house had been used as an interrogation centre by the French army, by their Japanese successors and then by the Viet Minh before the French Sûreté policemen returned. Vietnamese thought the place haunted, and would not enter it until monks were brought in to exorcize the house for a week, while the walls were hung with ghost-unfriendly mirrors.
Although the new wave of CIA officers likewise wished to exorcize the residual spirit of the ‘cowboy’ Lansdale, the Saigon station took over many of his best operatives, whose names would recur again and again in the history of Vietnam. One of Colby’s more lamentable schemes was the Lansdale-esque Project Tiger, involving the air or sea insertion of agents into North Vietnam, of whom the only ones to escape execution were those who had been turned, replicating the success of British counter-intelligence against the Germans in the Second World War.15
Nor were the soldiers idle. Under Project Beefup, the number of military advisers rose from 3,205 in December 1961 to 9,000 a year later. MAAG was transformed into a new Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) under General Paul Harkins and its role expanded to piloting aircraft and helicopters on combat missions, with some token South Vietnamese aviator present should anything go wrong or a plane be shot down by the Viet Minh. JFK also authorized the use of defoliants to deny the enemy forest cover, and herbicides to kill off their food crops.
Questioned by the press, JFK denied that the advisers were engaged in combat, even though some were being decorated for valour and others killed in action. He also tried to exercise control over a Saigon press corps that had once largely supported the American engagement but was becoming radically disillusioned by what they heard and saw on the ground. On one occasion JFK personally telephoned the publisher of the New York Times to get a foreign correspondent removed.
Illusion and Reality
The Kennedy administration was captive to the doctrine of sub-nuclear ‘flexible response’. Counter-insurgency operations were only one item in the tool kit. It also included tactical good deeds of a progressive nature, what nowadays is called ‘nation-building’. JFK was sympathetic to hearts-and-minds warfare, involving quarantining the population from the Viet Cong so as ‘to put a TV in every thatched hut’, while the army pursued and killed the enemy lurking in between. Senior military commanders appreciated that this flexible response might boost their budgets, but were fundamentally wedded to more conventional forms of warfare based on eliminating the enemy with main force, or as they had it: ‘Grab ’em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.’16
As it happened this was the view being pushed in Saigon by Sir Robert Thompson, veteran of the Malayan Emergency, whom Diem had consulted to reduce his dependence on the Americans. Thompson’s British Advisory Mission (BRIAM), established in September 1961, proposed a plan to clear the Viet Cong from the Mekong Delta and to secure the population through the creation of ‘strategic hamlets’. Thompson’s memoirs are filled with lazy patronizing comments about both the Americans and the Vietnamese. The American reputation for efficiency was ‘mythical’; ‘no American we met had read Mao’. Actually, some of them had, in the original, for Thompson overlooked those thousands of American missionaries whose cosmopolitan children had grown up speaking Mandarin.17 In his view Vietnam was just Malaya on a bigger scale, for he had no grasp of what made the Viet Cong a very different fighting proposition from the Communists in Malaya. He failed to notice that some of the Americans knew a great deal about what had happened in Malaya, particularly the US foreign service officer Charles Cross and the sinologist Lucian Pye, author of Guerrilla Communism in Malaya (1956), which was based on interviews with captured Communists.18
There were actually few meaningful lessons to be drawn from Malaya, where the Communist insurgents were ethnic Chinese and the majority population Malay. Furthermore it had taken the British twelve years to get on top of them, in circumstances infinitely more propitious than those prevailing in South Vietnam. One narrow land border between Malaya and Thailand was not comparable with the 800-mile internal frontier of dense jungle, rivers and mountains between Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The British had a functioning administration throughout Malaya; in Vietnam a similar set-up had vanished with the French. Vietnam had an abundance of rice, Malaya did not, which enabled the British to use food supplies as a means of population control. Finally the common threat from Indonesia concentrated both Malay and Chinese minds to accept a federal settlement once the British had promised independence.
Despite these differences, Diem simply rechristened his earlier agrovilles ‘strategic hamlets’ and called for increased aid, which was forthcoming because of the Malayan precedent. By September 1962 some 4,322,034 people (33.4 per cent of the population) were gathered in 2,800 strategic hamlets, corralled within moats and bristling bamboo spikes. The Americans dubbed them ‘oil spots’, the coalescence of which would exclude the Viet Cong from operating in a given area. While they marvelled at the speed with which all this was done, the Americans were unaware that the official driving the programme so fast, Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, was a highly placed Viet Minh agent, whose aim was to encourage peasant disaffection. He certainly succeeded.19
The problem was that the oil spots were widely dispersed, while the strategic hamlets took little or no notice of how peasants related to ancestral graves or worked their patchwork fields. All intervening areas were declared free-fire zones in which anything that moved could be pulverized with artillery and bombing. While US officials saw the strategic hamlets as an opportunity to introduce modernizing reforms in village life, Diem regarded them primarily as a means of political control. Aid money was now embezzled by an even larger number of corrupt officials, in a country where the pool of educated administrators was modest to begin with. The CIA also spread vast sums of money around, so much that they got the Vietnamese to sign for the few available trolleys the bulky cash was moved on rather than for the cash itself. By contrast, where they were in control, which meant much of the country after dark, the Viet Minh were scrupulously egalitarian, combining this with the systematic assassination of corrupt government officials.20
The delusion that these programmes were having an effect confirmed JFK’s reluctance to bring the big military club to bear. By the summer of 1962 he was contemplating withdrawing US advisers, starting the following year. One hears echoes of his doubts and dilemmas amid the beating of the war drums around him. For all the specious numerology, he knew that one basic set of figures did not compute. How could he justify sending US combat troops to fight 10,000 miles away, in what seemed a lopsided conflict involving 16,000 guerrillas and an indigenous South Vietnamese army which on paper numbered 200,000? As he astutely remarked: ‘The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer. And in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It’s like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.’21
But at the same time JFK’s defining fear of seeming soft on Communism prevented him from pushing for a diplomatic resolution of a conflict that was still at the stage of a civil war. He was loath to expand the negotiations over neutralizing Laos into a general settlement in Vietnam, based on de-escalation and mutually agreed partition. Under Secretary of State George Ball, Averell Harriman (newly appointed assistant secretary for Far Eastern affairs) and the US Ambassador to New Delhi John Kenneth Galbraith urged this course on him. Galbraith envisaged using the Indians as a backchannel to Hanoi, and Harriman slipped into a Geneva kitchen to hold clandestine talks with the North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Ung Van Khiem. Khiem, wearing a Soviet suit much too large for him, wasted the opportunity by raging at the seventy-year-old American statesman. Harriman drew himself up to his full height to tower over Khiem, looked the ‘insulting little thug’ in the eye and told him he ‘was in for a long, tough war’.22
The Soviets would certainly have come aboard any negotiated settlement. Khrushchev was as exasperated by ‘all those silly Laotian names or the individuals to whom these names belonged’ as were Americans such as Ball, who described the names as a series of typographical errors. ‘Laos, Vietnam, all Southeast Asia,’ Khrushchev exclaimed to Harriman. ‘You and the Chinese can fight over it. I give up. We give up. We don’t want any of it!’23 The problem was their respective clients, who were not really clients at all. Diem knew he would be an early casualty of any broadening of the Saigon regime to make it more pluralistic, while the North Vietnamese could not be persuaded to pretend that any popular-front arrangement would be anything other than a temporary arrangement prior to their complete takeover of South Vietnam.
Supposedly dependable numbers and not old-fashioned perceptions of linguistic nuances and cultural differences led to insufficient urgency being given to the exploration of these possibilities. Even at this early stage, the US military were quantifying victory in terms of body counts, prisoners taken, numbers of aerial sorties and so on, the only language understood by Defense Secretary McNamara; for this, as David Halberstam argued so persuasively in The Best and the Brightest, was above all McNamara’s war. He completely eclipsed Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the loyal Presbyterian who saw it as his job to express his own views only in private to the President, and sometimes not even then.
A registered Republican, McNamara was the supreme can-do guy in the Kennedy administration, an academic accountant and statistician turned whizz-kid president of the giant Ford automobile company. Although he looked about as buttoned down as it was possible to be with his slicked-back dark hair and large, black-rimmed glasses, he had read widely and was able to exchange quotations with the academics in the Kennedy entourage. Having made his pile with what were naively thought to be infinitely transferable skills, he was now driven by a desire for power unqualified by any moral considerations. There was something chilling about a man who could spend eight hours watching data slides on Vietnam on a screen, only to call for the projector to be stopped because something on slide 869 did not tally with slide 11. If information did not come to him in the form of numbers or tables, McNamara had difficulty processing it and he was widely regarded as a barely human computer.24
The numbers flowing from MACV encouraged optimism, but the soldiers were lying to themselves as much as to Washington. A persistent American complaint was that the Viet Cong would never stand and fight, preferring to hit and run in the way natural to ‘raggedy-assed little bastards’. This was to underrate the pressures which the war exerted on Viet Minh commanders; if they failed then their peasant support might leach away. They were also required to undertake self-criticism among their troops, acknowledging and learning from their mistakes. The hierarchical US military insulated senior commanders from the truth and led to the reinforcement of failure, as did the good-old-boy fraternity-ring mafia among senior officers.
In January 1963 intelligence reported three Viet Cong companies grouped around a radio transmitter near the hamlet of Ap Bac, forty miles south-west of Saigon. An entire ARVN division was deployed against them. Instead of fleeing, the Viet Cong dug in and prepared to fight. The attack was a classic pincer operation, landing one force in helicopters despite thick fog, while another closed in with armoured personnel carriers. There was a substantial reserve force, and artillery and air cover. With a ten-to-one ARVN superiority, what could go wrong?
Almost everything, concluded the senior US adviser, Lieutenant-Colonel John Paul Vann, as he circled the battlefield in a spotter plane. After allowing the helicopter pilots to think the landings were unopposed, the Viet Cong unleashed deadly and sustained fire that destroyed five helicopters. The armoured units were slow in going to their relief, and when they did they too were ambushed amid near-total command chaos as Diem’s political appointees ignominiously failed their first test of combat. They had also subverted the entire point of the operation by leaving the Viet Cong an escape route, and, to round it off, when another airborne battalion was inserted, it was in the wrong place and a massive friendly-fire episode resulted.
Only because they were such poor shots was the death toll limited to sixty-one ARVN troops dead and a hundred wounded; the Viet Cong had vanished, leaving behind only three dead. They had even taken away their spent cartridge cases for reuse. As MACV proclaimed Ap Bac a major victory because the Viet Cong had conceded the field, a South Vietnamese artillery commander unleashed a pointless barrage on a village he believed deserted but which was actually occupied by ARVN troops. After realizing his mistake he shot the lieutenant acting as a forward observer, which under the circumstances seems to have been justified.25
Washing Diem Away
Seldom has an imperial power put its prestige behind a more suicidal group of puppets than the Ngo Dinh clan. Diem’s younger brother Nhu and his ghastly wife were bad enough, but it was elder brother Pierre Martin Ngo Dinh Thuc, Archbishop of Hué and the senior Catholic prelate in Vietnam, who did for his family. In May 1963 he prohibited the display of Buddhist banners during the celebrations commemorating the birth of the Gautama, citing a regulation prohibiting the display of non-government flags. Yet a few days earlier Catholics had been encouraged to fly Vatican flags to celebrate Thuc’s twenty-fifth anniversary as bishop, to pay for which the mainly Buddhist residents of Hué had been taxed by Ngo Dinh Can, another younger brother, who ran central Vietnam with a private army and his own secret police.26
On 8 May 1963 large crowds gathered in Hué to protest against the ban were fired on by Can’s thugs, killing nine protesters. Can and Diem blamed the Viet Cong, but in early June a sixty-six-year-old Buddhist bonze called Thich Quang Duc sat down in a lotus position at a Saigon junction and set himself alight with gasoline. What many American observers had regarded as a passive faith, until they saw Quang Duc in flames on the cover of Life, quickly became a powerful protest movement.27
Six more Buddhist priests immolated themselves with much further publicity, which Madame Nhu crassly described as ‘barbecues’. ‘Let them burn, and we shall clap our hands,’ she said. Although Diem assured the departing US Ambassador Frederick Nolting that he would take no further measures against the Buddhists, in August Nhu’s Special Forces (dressed as ARVN infantry) raided pagodas across the land, violently arresting 1,400 monks and sending them to join the already large number of political prisoners. Such operations brought the South Vietnamese army into such public discredit that some of its officers resolved on a coup.
The US government’s disaffection with Diem reached breaking point when it learned that Nhu was engaged in secret talks with Hanoi. The North Vietnamese were happy to play along, calculating that once they got the Americans out they could rid themselves of the Ngo Dinhs. This intelligence report on the clandestine meeting arrived in Washington on a Saturday, when the most senior players were away from their desks. Three officials, including Harriman, seized the opportunity to draft instructions to the new US Ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, to the effect that if Diem could not rid himself of the Nhus then Diem himself would have to go.
Lodge would play a key role in the coup. He was the incumbent Massachusetts Senator so narrowly defeated by Kennedy in 1952 and was Nixon’s running mate in 1960. JFK shrewdly sent him to Saigon as a lightning rod for Republican critics of his policy in South-east Asia. If a man who had twice lost murky elections to JFK was prepared to work for him, then Congressional Republicans should also accept him. Unlike Nolting, the tough patrician Lodge took an instant dislike to Diem. He also mistrusted CIA chief Richardson so much that he used a journalist to blow Richardson’s official cover. Lodge’s fresh instructions included permission to tell dissident Vietnamese generals that the US would support them ‘in any interim period of breakdown of central government mechanisms’. JFK cleared this signal from his Hyannis Port compound, although it is unclear whether he saw the whole cable or only had it read to him over the telephone. When he returned to Washington on Monday he found his cabinet almost at war with itself, as the cats discovered what the mice had done in their absence.
From then on the machinations in Saigon became frankly byzantine. Nhu and Diem had wind of the coup, and the plotters had to proceed with great caution. Lodge’s surrogate was Lucien Conein, the CIA’s secret liaison with the generals. Conein had been in Indochina for eighteen years, a pulp-fiction spy with a French twist, who crisscrossed Saigon accompanied by a heavy Magnum revolver in case Nhu, who was exhibiting signs of opium-induced paranoia, decided to have him assassinated. Conein met with General Tran Van Don, the notional head of the army, at a dentist’s office. The key conspirators included Don’s brother-in-law, General Le Van Kim, and General Duong Van Minh, the former corporal known as ‘Big Minh’. Like Don, all of them had been shuffled into marginal posts because Diem distrusted their popularity among the troops. Others whose careers would benefit from the removal of Diem and Nhu were recruited, including General Ton That Dinh, commander of Saigon district.
The conspirators had to be careful when meeting their MACV opposite numbers, since they were not apprised of the change in US policy and supported Diem. MACV chief Harkins did not even know that Vietnamese-speaking army signals officers had been brought in from the Philippines to transcribe the take from microphones planted to eavesdrop on the plotters when Conein was not present. Lodge, also, had to be careful because Nhu had comprehensively bugged the US embassy. Preparations for the coup went ahead with apparently routine command changes gradually moving Diem loyalists further from Saigon to prevent them rushing to defend the regime. Astrologers were consulted to divine which date had the most favourable aspects.28
There was one hiatus, as a further top-level delegation, led by McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, arrived in late September 1963, with William Colby along for the CIA. The last such visit, by Marine General Victor Krulak and the State Department’s Joseph Mendenhall, had prompted JFK’s famous quip: ‘The two of you did visit the same country, didn’t you?’29 McNamara had been appalled by the idea of removing Diem, not least because MACV’s General Harkins was reporting a war almost won. It seemed illogical to change the winning team in such circumstances. Certain aspects of the visit meant that ‘the computer’ began to be malfunction. While Diem’s two-hour opening monologue was nothing unusual – for McNamara had been to Vietnam before – there was the bizarre experience of staying with Lodge, who told him Diem was a lost cause, and then being briefed by Harkins’s staff who told him that nothing was wrong. Knowing McNamara’s obsession with facts and figures, the military men presented the war in such terms, with Harkins and Taylor beaming at their mastery of flow charts and graphs.
The Potemkin village collapsed when it came to a briefing on a certain province in the Mekong Delta. A young major, answering helpful questions from Maxwell Taylor, affirmed that everything in the Delta was hunkydory. However, McNamara had a copy of a report by a young CIA officer and rural affairs adviser called Rufus Phillips, which had caused serious ructions when it had been discussed by the NSC on 10 September. Phillips sent back a report by a US civilian adviser who bleakly estimated that the Viet Cong were in charge of 80 per cent of villages in the Delta, and affirmed that a US Army adviser had been reporting to his superiors in similar terms, without receiving any response. McNamara asked the young Major if he had read the reports. Yes, he had. Did he agree with them, asked the Defense Secretary. After a pause, for his eyes to flit over Harkins and Taylor, the Major said he did. Why hadn’t he reported the same developments? They were ‘beyond the parameters set by his superiors’.30
As they returned to Washington, McNamara and Taylor drew up their mission report. It included such gems as ‘our policy is to seek to bring about the abandonment of Diem’s repression because of its effect on the popular will to resist’. Despite concluding that the military programme ‘has made great progress and continues to progress’, such that a thousand US advisers could be withdrawn by Christmas, the two men agreed that relations with Diem should be ‘correct’ while a search was made for ‘alternative leadership’.31
On 1 November the conspirators moved, with Conein bustling about the capital armed with large bags of money. Their task was made easier by Nhu, who out-clevered himself by mounting a phoney coup to draw the real plotters into the open, which meant his own troops were not where they were needed when the real coup took place. Regime loyalists such as the head of Special Forces guarding Diem were arrested and summarily shot. After their pleas to Cabot Lodge were coldly rebuffed, Diem and Nhu managed to flee the palace for the Chinese quarter of Cholon, leaving the conspirators to storm the abandoned building. Trusting in assurances the plotters had given the Americans, Diem and his brother eventually agreed to surrender at St Francis Xavier’s Catholic church. When ‘Big Minh’ sent a select team to pick them up, by gestures he indicated that they must die. Diem and Nhu were bound and loaded into an armoured personnel carrier, and were butchered during the journey into central Saigon. The APC had to be hosed out afterwards.
Diem was briefly replaced by a twelve-man military junta that operated from an HQ near Tan Son Nhut Airport. On 29 January 1964 it was overthrown by a group of younger officers under General Nguyen Khanh, again with American connivance. Khanh was so uncertain about his own future that he took up residence in a villa on the Saigon River, convenient if he had to flee by boat. The CIA reckoned the new regime’s longevity in terms of weeks or months.32
When he learned that Diem and Nhu had been killed, JFK paled and rushed from the room, suddenly brought face to face with what he and some of the most liberal members of his administration had done. One might legitimately wonder who he and his colleagues thought would replace Diem, for the alternatives were more dismal than him, if they could be identified at all. Three weeks later Kennedy was himself assassinated, so we cannot know whether he would have continued down the blood-smoothed slope or would have found the moral courage to back off. It seems unlikely: he had no reason to believe that South Vietnam was a lost cause, especially with the Ngo Dinhs out of the way, and his fear of being seen as soft on Communism was as strong as ever.33 Responsibility for Vietnam devolved on a big-hearted but corrupt and cunning man who in domestic policy hoped to begin where FDR rather than JFK had left off. What happened to him deserves the epithet tragic.