A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam

  Lansdale prevented the conflict in Vietnam from ending with a total victory by Ho and his followers in 1956, or sooner had the French abdicated their role before then. South Vietnam, it can truly be said, was the creation of Edward Lansdale. He hoodwinked the pro-Bao Dai officers in the Vietnamese National Army who were about to overthrow Diem in the fall of 1954 and engineered their removal. He masterminded the campaign that began in the spring of 1955 to crush the French-subsidized armies of the two religious sects, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, and the troops of the Binh Xuyen organized crime society. (Originally a band of river pirates, the Binh Xuyen had purchased a franchise on the rackets in Saigon and had been given control of the police in exchange for suppressing Viet Minh terrorism in the city, a task that the Binh Xuyen had fulfilled efficiently.)

  Gen. J. Lawton “Lightning Joe” Collins, the new ambassador who arrived in the fall of 1954, told Diem to proceed slowly and to compromise with the sects. Lansdale urged Diem to follow his own inclination to smash them all and to assert the authority of the central government, using bribes and trickery to neutralize some of the sect leaders and force to snuff out those who could not be bribed or tricked. Conein helped Lansdale bring the Vietnamese National Army over to Diem’s side through his acquaintances among the officers. His message was simple and compelling: in the future the United States was going to pay and supply them and their troops directly, not through the French. If they wanted to keep their army and get promoted, they had better follow instructions from Lansdale and Diem, because Lansdale had the ear of the men who counted in Washington. Conein’s courage and his OSS training also made him one of the more useful members of a special action group Lansdale organized to pull off “dirty tricks” on Diem’s behalf during the height of the fighting with the Binh Xuyen in Saigon. From the beginning of March 1955 and on into May, Lansdale was at the palace almost every day and spent many of the nights with Diem—encouraging him, planning their moves, calling the plays with the tactical expertise that he had learned in the Huk war and that Diem lacked. Without Lansdale’s guile, his intuition for the bold stroke, and the reputation he had acquired with the powerful in Washington because of the apparent miracle in the Philippines, Diem would have been swept away.

  It was a near thing. Collins decided that Lansdale was a romantic visionary and Diem a crank. He flew back to Washington that April of 1955 and almost persuaded John Foster Dulles to get rid of both Lansdale and Diem and to resume cooperation with the French, who despised Diem and Lansdale and who were encouraging the sects and the Binh Xuyen to resist. Had Collins prevailed, there seems little doubt in retrospect that the French would have followed the predictable course of events and sooner or later turned the South over to the Communists. Allen Dulles took the renowned Frank Wisner, Lansdale’s boss as the CIA’s chief of clandestine operations, along to the meeting with Collins and his brother, John Foster. Wisner remembered the argument and later told one of his sons about it. Wisner had watched the Red Army and Stalin’s secret police take over Rumania as an OSS officer in World War II. The ugliness of the experience had made him a combatant like Lansdale in the struggle against Communism.

  Collins said that Lansdale was mad in claiming they could build a stable government around Diem in South Vietnam. Diem had absolutely no ability to govern and he was alienating everyone, refusing to be reasonable with the sects and to broaden his regime with other non-Communist politicians. America’s best hope was to replace Diem with another non-Communist acceptable to the French and pray that he could put some kind of government together. The possibilities of success were grim, given the chaos of the South, but at least there would be some hope. With Diem and Lansdale there was none.

  Wisner spoke up in Lansdale’s defense. Afterward he recalled thinking just before he raised his voice that he knew next to nothing about Vietnam and little more about Asia, but Americans had succeeded elsewhere and why shouldn’t they succeed in Vietnam too? He said that he had been to the Philippines, had met Magsaysay, and had seen what Lansdale had done there. The prospects in Vietnam certainly were poor: Lansdale admitted as much in his reports. There was a fighting chance nonetheless, and Lansdale had shown he had an intuition for these situations that defied everyone else. They ought to back his judgment.

  John Foster Dulles did not share Wisner’s faith. He sent a cable to the embassy on April 27, 1955, instructing the acting chief of mission to find another prime minister for the Saigon government. At the palace the next day, before the embassy could start putting the instructions into effect, Diem asked Lansdale about the message. He had heard about Dulles’s decision from his embassy in Washington. Lansdale assured him that whatever he might have heard, Vietnam still needed a leader and the United States was behind him. He persuaded Diem to order a counterattack that afternoon against the Binh Xuyen, who had started mortaring the palace and shooting at the soldiers of the Vietnamese National Army again to try to intimidate Diem. The 2,500 troops of the organized crime society were no match for the battalions Lansdale had arrayed on Diem’s side with Conein’s assistance once the battle began in earnest. The Binh Xuyen in central Saigon were broken in nine hours and fled to the Chinese suburb of Cholon. With the Binh Xuyen defeated, the religious sects did not appear as formidable as before. Dulles quickly countermanded his instructions. The embassy burned his earlier cable. There were no further lapses of faith in Lansdale. The United States had made up its mind, as Dulles put it, to “take the plunge” with Diem.

  In October 1955, Lansdale sealed the commitment. He helped Diem rig a plebiscite to depose Bao Dai as head of state and establish Diem as president of the new Republic of Vietnam. (The occasional rigging of an election was permissible in the just cause.) Diem won 98.2 percent of the vote, a fraction more than Ho usually claimed for himself in national elections in the North. The resistance groups that Conein helped Lansdale to plant in the North were soon discouraged or wiped out by the Viet Minh, but Lansdale accomplished his mission in the South. He consolidated the position of Diem and his family and created what seemed to be a stable central government. His achievement was to bring on the second war that Vann was sent to fight seven years later.

  During a moment of clarity long afterward, Bumgardner suddenly understood how erroneously they had interpreted the reception Diem received at Tuy Hoa that day in 1955. He remembered that the crowd at the soccer field did not seem to be paying much attention to what Diem was saying when they cheered and applauded. The faces smiled, the voices shouted, but the eyes were vacant. The truth came to him. The crowd had not been listening to Diem.

  The whole thing had simply been a holiday for the peasants and the townspeople. They had attended enough Viet Minh rallies during the first war to know that when the cadres in the crowd gave the signal, they were supposed to cheer and applaud. The organizers whom Diem’s brother, Nhu, had sent ahead to Tuy Hoa had been in the crowd giving similar signals. The peasants responded obligingly. Diem was not well known to ordinary Vietnamese then, and these peasants and provincial townsfolk could not have had the faintest idea who he was. They were bored, extremely bored, by all the years of isolation from the outside world. They were full of joy that the war was over. The landing of a plane—a real airplane—with an exalted visitor to speak to them was a marvelous thrill and an occasion for a celebration. They would have run out and nearly trampled Diem to death had he been the prime minister of Nepal.

  Many of these same peasants and townsfolk had relatives among the guerrillas who went to the North. When the second war began, the Tuy Hoa valley turned into one of the strongest guerrilla bases in the South, with a population thoroughly antagonistic to Diem’s government in Saigon. Bumgardner realized how foolish it had been of him and other Americans to think that they could promote Diem into a national hero to compete with Ho Chi Minh. Diem had no following beyond the Catholics, and with his personality and political and social attitudes, he had no hope of acquiring one. His rule could only turn out to be destructive.
r />   Lansdale was a victim in Vietnam of his success in the Philippines. Men who succeed at an enterprise of great moment often tie a snare for themselves by assuming that they have discovered some universal truth. Lansdale assumed, as much as his superiors did, that his experience in the Philippines applied to Vietnam. It did not. The Filipinos Lansdale befriended in the 1940s and ’50s were a unique people, quite atypical of most Asians. Lansdale’s Filipinos were brown Americans. Except for the color of their skin and other physical features, they bore about as much resemblance to the Vietnamese as Lansdale did. Their Independence Day was the Fourth of July. They spoke English with a slightly out-of-date American slang. They liked jazz and much else in American popular culture; they had national organizations like the Philippines Veterans Legion and the Jaycees; they bore names like Col. Mike Barbero, Magsaysay’s first assistant for psychological warfare, who was succeeded by a Maj. Joe Crisol, both of whom worked with another Magsaysay assistant, “Frisco Johnny” San Juan. They staged operations against the Huks with code names like Four Roses, for their favorite whiskey, and Omaha, after the D-Day beachhead at Normandy. The CIA was notorious for hiring Filipinos to staff its Asian operations because they were so Americanized. Their presence in an office or a maintenance shop announced that the CIA owned the place.

  What guidance Lansdale provided had no impact on forming the values and attitudes of these Filipinos of the early postwar years. He had manipulated a people whose outlook on life had already been shaped by nearly half a century of American tutelage and by the westernizing influence of more than three hundred years of Spanish colonization prior to the seizure of the islands by the United States in 1898. Almost 95 percent of the population was Christian, the great majority Roman Catholic, making the Philippines the sole Christian nation in Asia. During the war against Japan these Filipinos and the Americans of their time had formed the bond whose strength is known only to men who have faced death together in battle. There were more Filipino than American heroes in the defense of the Bataan Peninsula. (The garrison numbered 15,000 Americans and 65,000 Filipinos.) On the Bataan Death March to the prison camps afterward, three Filipinos perished for every American—2,300 Americans and 5,000 to 7,600 Filipinos. (No one knows the exact number.) When Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s assault troops leaped from their landing craft into the surf of Leyte Gulf on October 20,1944, to liberate the islands, two soldiers of the 24th Infantry Division, one an American and one a Filipino, raised the Stars and Stripes and the red-white-blue-and-gold sunburst banner of the Philippines over Red Beach. The sight of the Stars and Stripes brought forth in Lansdale’s Filipino friends the same emotions as that of their own flag. To them the star-spangled banner represented the spirit of independence and freedom from tyranny. Lansdale’s Filipinos knew what they wanted to achieve. They were like eleven football players who understood how to play and had a star halfback and yet could not form themselves into a team because they lacked a coach. Lansdale became their coach, and he was a brilliant coach, but he won because his players were so suited to the game.

  When Diem told Lansdale that he had resisted the French and spoke of his abhorrence of godless Communism, Lansdale let his preconceptions lead him to false assumptions, as Vann was later to do with Cao. He also thought it was perfectly all right for a Vietnamese leader to be publicly supported by the United States and to associate with high-ranking Americans. After all, he had just come from an Asian country in which the secretary of defense had shared a house in the American military compound with a CIA agent and had lost none of his political integrity as a result. Lansdale thought the Catholic refugees from the North were Vietnamese patriots who had “fought for their country’s freedom from the French” until they discovered that they were being hoodwinked in a Communist conspiracy and so were fleeing south to “Free Vietnam” to create a new life of liberty there. Haiphong in the final months of their evacuation was “reminiscent of our own pioneer days,” he said in his secret report. He saw nothing wrong with the United States singling out these Catholics for special assistance. He saw nothing inappropriate about having a Catholic as president of what he perceived to be a “Free Vietnam.”

  Roman Catholics were a tainted minority in Vietnam. Lansdale was anxious to draw a distinction between Americans and French “colonialists.” What he did was to make the distinction one without a difference. His actions were now being seen in the perspective of Vietnamese, not Filipino, history. By singling out the Catholics for help, and by putting a Catholic in office in Saigon, he announced that the United States was stepping in to replace the French. Vietnamese converts to Catholicism had been used by the French as a fifth column to penetrate precolonial Vietnam and then had been rewarded by the colonizer for their collaboration. They were popularly regarded as a foreign-inspired, “un-Vietnamese” religious sect. With the French leaving, the Catholics were naturally seeking another foreign protector. They told Lansdale what they sensed he wanted to hear.

  Ngo Dinh Diem did not believe in representative government, although he had learned enough about Americans during two and a half years of exile in the United States to give Lansdale the impression that he did. He was also not interested in social justice. He did not want to alter the traditional Vietnamese social structure that the French had preserved in desiccated form. Diem was a fervent reactionary, intent on founding a new family dynasty in a country where most other thinking people thought that dynasties were anachronisms. There had once been a Ngo dynasty, a brief one, in the tenth century. Diem saw himself heading a second one to replace the Nguyen dynasty that had been discredited by the degenerate Bao Dai. His family would help him to rule in the traditional dynastic manner. His concession to modernity would be to call himself a president. Diem’s quarrel with the French had been an angry but narrow one, and what dimmed claim to nationalist credentials he once held was besmirched the moment he became Bao Dai’s prime minister. At that moment Diem inherited Bao Dai’s quisling administration and the Vietnamese element of the French colonial army, police, and civil bureaucracy, and he let the Americans make him their surrogate. The attitudes that held in the Philippines held in reverse in Vietnam. It was not patriotic in Vietnam to collaborate with the Americans. To many Vietnamese, the Americans stood for colonialism, oppression, and social injustice.

  With so much of the imagery of the American Revolution in his head, Lansdale could not imagine that he could join the wrong side or become the wrong side in an Asian country in the midst of its national revolution. The strength of their American ideology also made it impossible for men like Bumgardner and Vann to accept this possibility. Yet this was precisely what had happened in Vietnam. There was a national revolution going on in Vietnam, and the United States was not part of it. America had first joined the wrong side by equipping and financing the French in their venture to reimpose colonial rule. America was now becoming the wrong side by moving directly into Vietnam to install Diem and his family as the representatives of its power.

  Col. Alfred Kitts was to hold a province capital for Vann against a three-day Communist assault during the Tet 1968 Offensive. Long afterward, from the perspective of retirement on a horse farm in Pennsylvania, Kitts thought that he might not have had to fight that battle if the United States had acted differently at the very beginning. Born to a soldier’s and a horseman’s life, “Bud” Kitts was the son of an officer in the field artillery who was a distinguished Army equestrian, riding on the U.S. Olympic team at both the 1932 and 1936 Olympics. Kitts had enlisted a month after graduation from high school in 1943, served in the Philippines, and then, while a first lieutenant in January 1946, had been transferred to Haiphong. There he was a member of a twenty-six-man U.S. Army team in charge of shipping home disarmed Japanese soldiers, cramming them stockyard-fashion into small Liberty Ship transports. Kitts spoke some French and was able to communicate with the Viet Minh officers whose troops were in control of the city. The Vietnamese were friendly to him and the other Americans. They did not mention
Communism, only their desire for independence from France and their hope for American assistance in gaining it. This was the period when Ho Chi Minh was playing down his Communist beliefs and the leadership role of the Party in the national revolution in order to form a broad political front within the country and win acceptance and protection from the United States to prevent a French return.

  Kitts watched the first French troops who entered the North come ashore at Haiphong on March 6, 1946. They looked like the U.S. Army. They were wearing American helmets, packs, ammunition belts, fatigues, and boots. The landing craft from which they unloaded were American-made, and so were their heavy weapons, vehicles, and the other equipment the United States had originally given Charles de Gaulle’s Free French under the Lend-Lease Act to fight the Nazis and the Japanese.

  The Viet Minh officers and troops were angered at the arrival of the French. Ho had agreed to let the French station garrisons in Haiphong, Hanoi, and the other major towns of the North only because he otherwise faced an invasion. He had received in exchange a promise of limited independence. The French had quickly begun to dishonor that promise. There were incidents of shooting almost immediately. The Vietnamese officers remained friendly to Kitts and his fellow Americans. They did not yet blame the Americans, as the Viet Minh would later do, for arming and supplying the French. They still seemed to regard Kitts and his teammates as their allies, as different from the colonialists. The Vietnamese believed the pronouncements the United States had made on why it was fighting World War II. There was also a holdover of goodwill from the alliance against the Japanese. The OSS had found the Viet Minh the only Vietnamese resistance group sufficiently well organized and widespread within Vietnam to provide good intelligence on the Japanese, to rescue American pilots, and to conduct sabotage and other behind-the-lines operations. (The colonial army survivors whom Conein’s team worked with had proved mainly interested in preparing for postwar reconquest.) The OSS had parachuted a training mission to one of Ho’s wartime headquarters in the rugged jungle country north of the Red River Delta and had provided thousands of carbines, submachine guns, and other weapons to arm the original Viet Minh formations.