SAIGON
HE LIKED SCOTCH WHISKEY, SOME said too much. The CIA rated him “eccentric.” Behind the Hollywood sunglasses, the tailored paratrooper fatigues, and a rakish red beret, Brigadier General Ton That Dinh had a streak of megalomania as big as all outdoors. Dinh confided that he was a “national hero” to one American reporter. To his U.S. Army adviser, Dinh portrayed himself as the finest soldier in the army of South Vietnam. Although only thirty-six, he once demanded to be appointed minister of the interior, the number two job in Diem’s government. His runaway ego often pushed him over the edge. Still, Dinh became the boozy star attraction in President Kennedy’s second putsch against a democratically elected ally, President Diem of South Vietnam. The first coup had collapsed a week after Kennedy’s hasty approval. The aborted plan hinged on Saigon generals without the troops needed to overcome the Gia Long Palace guard. It was a mistake Kennedy would not repeat. As military governor of Saigon, Dinh controlled both troops within the city and divisions of infantry and armor within striking distance of the capital. Dinh’s other chief attribute was that he was for sale. When Dinh’s name first surfaced at the White House, Army General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, presented him as the key to overthrowing the Diem government.
“It appears,” Taylor told the president, “General Dinh, the III Corps commander, is the key to this personnel situation—if he is in anyway corruptible.” Roger Hilsman, a leader of the State Department faction against Diem, had a ready answer. “We have some plans about how we might corrupt Dinh,” Hilsman told Kennedy. That was affirmed by Defense Secretary McNamara. “There are such additional actions specifically to buy over or persuade over or otherwise induce Dinh,” McNamara assured the president.
Kennedy’s order to bribe Dinh left Washington the same day—at 9:32 P.M. on August 28. It was presented in the form of questions to General Harkins and Lodge. But that was a diplomatic dodge to sugarcoat the seamy nature of the presidential decision to buy off Diem’s most important military defender.
Specifically, do you think we should:
—encourage Harkins and other military officers [to] discreetly hint to Gen. Dinh and other military leaders who are potential fence-sitters about continued US opposition to the Saigon government?
—add financial inducements as appropriate in affecting all individual decisions of uncertain key figures?
Dinh was well known to the two top U.S. agents, Rufus Phillips and Lucein Conein. Frequently, Dinh would arrive at Conein’s Saigon home with a fanfare of siren-screeching escorts. In Conein’s home, Dinh had installed a red phone as a direct connection to the U.S. embassy. He would say little, drink a glass of scotch, and then roar off to some nightclub party. Twelve days after Kennedy was told that Dinh was for sale, Phillips began nosing around Saigon. Phillips asked Diem’s secretary of state, Nguyen Dinh Thuan, about Dinh’s loyalty to the president who had given him everything. “Thuan went on to say that in his opinion, General Dinh could definitely be ‘had’ for an appropriate price in liquor, women, and cash,” Phillips said in a top secret cable to Washington. In another CIA report to Washington on September 17, General Tran Thien Khiem mentioned a meeting with Dinh. “Khiem said that General Dinh claims that an American official offered him the amount of 20 million piasters [about $600,000 U.S.] if he, Dinh, would overthrow the government.”
Dinh’s power far outstripped that of any other Saigon general because of the warm, paternal feelings Diem had toward him. Dinh came out of the provinces on the recommendation of the president’s brother Ngo Dinh Can, the governor of Hue. He soon qualified for paratrooper training in France, then caught the eye of the president. Dinh converted from Buddhism to become what was known as a rice-bowl Catholic, a switch to impress Diem. Dinh also became leader of the military wing of the Can Lo Party, brother Nhu’s political front. Diem picked Dinh to oversee the August 20 crackdown on Buddhist demonsrators. The president later slipped Dinh a cash bonus. Senior generals had urged Diem to impose martial law to curb the protests undercutting the fight against the Viet Cong. At that palace meeting, Diem and Nhu announced that Dinh was in charge of military forces in addition to becoming military governor of Saigon. The only other Diem assignment was for General Le Quang Tung, commander of the CIA-financed Special Forces, which were in effect Diem’s personal guard. A third person named by Diem, General Tran Van Don, was less important. Don, like other generals involved in the first coup, was a staff man without troops.
That Kennedy was recruiting Dinh would have made the Saigon press corps chuckle. After the mass arrests of monks and student protestors on August 21, Dinh appeared at a press conference to claim the public adulation he thought he deserved. Some of the rambunctious American journalists suspected Dinh had had a snootful that day. He was swaggering more than usual. His Cambodian bodyguards—who spoke neither French nor Vietnamese—glowered at the reporters and photographers. Dinh proclaimed that he had overcome the communist forces behind the Buddhist protest as well as the “foreign adventurers” involved. That was a tired code word for the American embassy.
Well, demanded Ray Herndon of UPI, just who are these adventurers?
Dinh ducked the question, but Herndon pressed on, using Dinh’s boast to another reporter as an additional prod. After all, as a national hero you should be able to identify a national enemy, Herndon said. Perhaps, Herndon said, Dinh should call Madame Nhu to find out the names of the enemies. That produced howls of laughter. With his Cambodian gorilla shoving people out of the way, the chagrined Dinh stormed out of the press conference.
While the record shows Kennedy did bribe Dinh to join the coup against Diem, the size of the payoff remains uncertain. A 1968 reconstruction of the Saigon coup in the Paris news magazine L’Express reported a $1 million bribe. It quoted Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett saying Lodge negotiated the bribe with Dinh in September. Burchett, a left-wing war-horse, had important connections in Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow.
But the payoff could have been as little as $70,000. That amount surfaced during top secret testimony by Conein to Senate investigators in 1975. Conein said he brought $70,000 worth of Vietnam piasters to coup headquarters as the generals demanded. According to Conein, the money was for families of men killed during coup battles. He had had the piasters in his safe since October 24.
A different version came from William Colby, then director of Central Intelligence. At the time of the coup, Colby was the Washington boss of CIA Saigon operations. “The generals used it [the $70,000] to attract additional support,” Colby told the senators. “I can’t name which ones.”
Was that for a bribe? one senator asked Colby.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Colby responded.
The strongest evidence that Dinh was paid a substantial amount came from McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security adviser. After the coup was over, Bundy conducted a meeting with Rusk, McNamara, Hilsman, and others. Bundy, “said we do not know what price has been paid to gain support of certain generals who backed the coup. Probably the price was rather high,” reported Bromley Smith, the executive secretary of the National Security Council. Smith’s finished report became part of the historical record of the meeting. However, that edited version did not reflect the original details recorded in Smith’s handwritten notes of the meeting. It read: “Bundy—Dinh probably bought off at high price,” which indicates a bribe closer to the $600,000 that Dinh said had been offered by an American agent. Whatever the amount, it did not last long. A decade later, Phillips had gone into the private sector and was eating at a Washington cafeteria. Spooning out food on the other side of the steam table was the former general Ton That Dinh. Years later, when Dunn, Lodge’s personal assistant, was asked about the Dinh bribe, he, like Colby, refused to give amounts. “We spent a lot of money,” Dunn said.
Because of his position as Lodge’s right hand, Dunn found himself on the receiving end of palace invitations from Diem, who sought out Dunn as a channel to Lodge. In their meetings, Dunn grew to admire Diem’s intelligence, integrity, and political achievements. “He’s the one that unified the country,” Dunn said. “He [Diem] spent a lot of time talking to me. He was a very shrewd article.” Diem took Dunn on several trips to the countryside to view the Strategic Hamlet Program. Knowing Dunn was a military officer, Diem often discussed military strategy. Diem would unfold a map of the region and show Dunn key locations. According to Diem, with unlimited supplies from Moscow and Beijing, Hanoi was amassing division after division. “There’ll be a time when they’ll come at us with tanks in division strength; when they are ready,” Diem said of Hanoi. Few in Saigon at the time recognized the determination of Ho Chi Minh to conquer the Saigon government; Ho’s army was evolving from underfed guerrillas to an unstoppable force. “The potency of these people” was little understood, Diem told Dunn. Diem branded as nonsense that it would be an endless struggle with the Viet Cong. “We can handle the guerrillas,” Diem said. It was the Hanoi juggernaut of some future year that Diem was depending on the U.S. military power to halt. He tapped invasion points on the map.
What Diem wanted from Dunn, from Lodge, from the American president was protection from that future Hanoi juggernaut. Otherwise, he told Dunn, “We have to fight and die alone.” Eleven years later when Hanoi moved south with divisions and armor, Dunn got out a map. “They finally did come across the very places that he pointed out to me,” Dunn said.
Dunn’s religion also brought the American soldier and the Confucian mandarin closer together. “No one in the [American] mission could identify with his peculiar brand of Catholicism. I didn’t have any trouble with that. I came from a background where church and state were not nearly as separable as most Americans see them.” Diem, like most Catholics, saw what he wanted to see from the religion, Dunn said. “He liked some aspects better than others, as I do, as everybody does.” On some Sundays, Dunn and Diem would attend the same Mass in Notre Dame, a Romanesque cathedral of rosy brick and stained-glass windows imported from Marseille and Chartres. Dunn would be in the pews after confession, absolution of his sins, and Holy Communion. Diem would sit inside the altar rail, where Archbishop Binh would frequently nod to the president.
Knowing what was in store for the Saigon government, Dunn included the small man with the intense eyes in his prayers.