Copyright © 1972 by Wilfred Burchett.
The Receiving End (1) by Wilfred Burchett
“It is repugnant for honest people to think that the
government of a country with the standing of the United States had, for many
years, premeditated, prepared, and planned, down to the most minute details,
systematic aggression; a criminal war of genocide and biocide against a small
people, a small country situated 10,000 kilometers and more from America’s
frontiers; to think that this government for many years on end has deliberately
and knowingly lied to cover up the crime, to hide its plans and deceive
American public opinion, the American Congress, and America’s allies as well as
its friends and supporters throughout the world.
“When American presidents declare that all they want
is peace; that they will never commit aggression; that they will never resort
to force; that all they want is to defend democracy and freedom in Vietnam; any
amount of people throughout the world had difficulty in believing that this was
nothing but sheer lies and, even worse, cynical cover-ups for the most detailed
preparations and plans for war. Decent people thought there must be at least a
modicum of truth and sincerity in the word of leaders of one of the most
important governments in the world. They thought there must be much propaganda
in the accusations of the ‘other side’ against the White House and the
Pentagon.
“Today, it is high time to inspect the evidence. The
truth has been flushed out into broad daylight. The official documents, notes,
minutes of working sessions, directives, circulars—in all 7,000 pages,
2,500,000 words, reveal in black and white the extent of the plot and the lies....
(2)
“For over 20 years, Yankee imperialism fixed its
prey, spread its nets, set its traps, orchestrated its propaganda, launched the
necessary provocations to end up by hurling over 11 million tons of bombs at
Vietnam and casting $200 billion into the Indochina abyss.... Truman,
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, finally Nixon—Democrats and Republicans, one can
hardly imagine more dissimilar personalities—have succeeded each other, but
Washington’s Vietnam and Indochina policy has not deviated an iota.
“Events have unfolded as in a scenario prepared by a
one-track-mind producer. The most murderous weapons have been tried out; the
most barbarous forms of warfare employed; the most bloodthirsty minions
utilized and, when necessary, physically liquidated when they outlived their
usefulness.
“For the Vietnamese people who saw the first US
warships arrive in Saigon waters in March 1950 and from then on saw US military
missions at work, followed by swarms of Yankee ‘advisers’ of all types,
followed in turn by hordes of GIs, the Pentagon Papers merely confirm the
opinion about Yankee imperialism that they have consistently held for 20-odd
years. For the Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian peoples, as for all those who
have had to face up to Yankee imperialism in recent years, these documents
hardly constitute real secrets. For we have had to judge the men in Washington by
their deeds, not by their speeches; and the sequence and logic of these acts
amply proved the true nature of Yankee imperialism.
“When dealing with matters such as the death of Diem,
the refusal to hold the 1956 elections, the ‘Tonkin Gulf incident,’ or the
eventual use of nuclear weapons, these documents certainly do not reveal
everything. There is still plenty to be said! But the essential is there. The
policy of intervention, the aggression waged by Washington with great obduracy
and duplicity against Vietnam and the peoples of Indochina...”
This must be taken only as a preliminary reaction
from Hanoi—in late September 1971—based on what the North Vietnamese had seen
and heard of the Pentagon Papers till that date. It was before the Senator
Gravel edition or the Government edition had been published and doubtless much
more will be heard from Hanoi when those much more complete texts have been
studied.
It is quite true that there is still “plenty to be
said”; many things have been omitted which provide vital clues to understanding
the real import of the Papers. The documents “hardly constitute real secrets”
for those of us present at the receiving end of these policies and who have dug
hard for confirmatory data from the initiating end. McNamara’s researchers seem
to have missed quite a lot of confirmatory data available even in the memoirs
of qualified Establishment higherups. For instance, although the Papers deal in
detail with contingency plans for joint or unilateral U.S. military
intervention from the period of the Dien Bien Phu battle right up to the 11th
hour of the 1954 Geneva Cease-fire Agreements, they do not deal with very firm
plans, drawn up immediately after Geneva for a unilateral United States
invasion of North Vietnam and the occupation of the Red River Delta up to, and
including Hanoi, for a start. As a “declaration of intention” and an
explanation of what followed, this is crucial. A major participant in this
planning. Brigadier General James M. Gavin, in a book that attracted comparatively
little attention, reveals the whole plot. Gavin, at the time of which he
writes, was Deputy in Charge of Plans to General Matthew B. Ridgway, Army Chief
of Staff. (3)
After the French “unwisely folded” by signing the
1954 Geneva Agreements, Gavin reveals, the Pentagon view, supported by John
Foster Dulles and the CIA, was that “it was obviously up to us to assume the
full burden of combat against Communism in that area....” It was in this
spirit, he continues, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff “began with the highest
priority to study a proposal to send combat troops into the Red River delta of
North Vietnam....”
It is later made quite clear that this planning
started immediately after the Geneva Agreements, which in the Pentagon view,
represented an unpleasant interruption in the business of “stopping Communism”
for which the United States had been footing the bills till then but would now
have to take over the actual fighting.
“As Chief of Plans of the Army Staff,” continues
Gavin, “I was responsible for recommending what attitude the Army should take
towards this proposal to put American ground troops into North Vietnam....” In
his consultations, Gavin and his colleagues, including “the best Asian experts,”
concluded that in invading North Vietnam they would also be taking on China.
The Navy made this quite clear by pointing out that they could not guarantee
safety for the invasion force unless they first occupied the Chinese island of
Hainan. After a visit to the area. Gavin came to the conclusion that the
invasion would require “eight combat divisions supported by 35 engineering
battalions and all the artillery and logistics support such mammoth
undertakings require...
The fact that the United States had pledged not to
use force or “threat of force” to upset the Geneva Agreements seems not to have
entered into the considerations of the planners. As for the danger of war with
China:
Admiral Radford [then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, W.B.] was emphatically in favor of landing a force in the Haiphong-Hanoi
area, even if it meant risking war with Red China. In this he was fully
supported by the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and the Chief of Naval
Operations [continued Gavin]. In my opinion such an operation meant a great
risk of war.... The Navy was unwilling to risk their ships in the Haiphong area
without first invading and capturing the island. Admiral Radford and the Chiefs
of the Navy and Air Force felt that, faced with overwhelming power, the Red
Chinese would not react to this violation of their sovereignty. General Ridgway
and I had grave doubts about the validity of this reasoning....”
Ridgway, with his Korean experience (a) in getting
involved with Chinese troops in a ground war and (b) the ineffectiveness of air
power in such wars, was against the plan. He went over the head of Radford
directly to President Eisenhower and as a result the proposal was killed. By
everything that Gavin writes, this was not just a bit of “contingency planning”
but a real plan of war which had “highest priority” and could not have been
initiated without Eisenhower’s support. Gavin makes it clear that he and
Ridgway had the greatest difficulty in getting the plan canceled. He refers to “weeks
and months” during which “we were to argue forcefully and frequently against
such a war....”
How such a war would have been justified, Gavin does
not reveal. But the later fakery with the “Tonkin Gulf” incident proved that
pretexts are no problem once the decision has been made! The war, for the
moment, was called off. But Gavin points out there was a “compromise.” There
would be a “Vietnamization” of the plans. “We would not attack North Vietnam,”
Gavin continues, “but we would support a South Vietnamese government that we
hoped would provide a stable, independent government that was representative of
the people....” Here Gavin was writing with his tongue in his cheek. The “compromise”
as he knew full well was that the United States would place a military machine
in the hands of Ngo Dinh Diem that would do what Eisenhower had thwarted
Dulles, the CIA, and Pentagon from doing in 1954. Why this vital link in the
chain of intentions is omitted from the Pentagon Papers, when there is so much
frankness on other matters, is difficult to understand. It makes so many other things
comprehensible. What followed in the South was preparation for the “March to
the North.” The United States took over the training and build-up of Diem’s
forces; graduates at the training schools pledged to “march to the North” and
were issued shoulder flashes bearing this motto. Gavin reveals that following
the abandonment of the earlier war plan he was sent to Saigon “early in 1955...
to discuss political and economic plans plus military aid and assistance....”
As far as I know—and I was in the North from October
1954 until May 1957 —Ho Chi Minh was not aware of the Dulles-Radford plan, but
he was aware of secret aggression against the North, immediately after the
Geneva Accords went into effect. The North Vietnamese were aware of the
American hand behind false rumors—such as those, spread by a Lansdale team, of
Chinese troops raping North Vietnamese girls—and the propaganda campaign to
scare Catholics into fleeing to the South to escape the A-bombs which would be
used against the “pagans” who remained in the North. Many of Lansdale’s agents
deserted—as he admits—the moment they set foot in the North, so the Vietnamese
were well aware of his activities—if not of his personality, and those of his
psywar, espionage, and sabotage teams as detailed in Document 95 [Gravel
edition, 1:573- 583].
By accident I personally stumbled on evidence of
their activities at the Hongay- Campha coal-mining area. It was toward the end
of the 300-day period during which the French were allowed to retain an enclave
around Haiphong port through which their forces were gradually to be evacuated
to the South. (Three hundred days from the signing of the Geneva Agreements was
the period provided for completing the regrouping of both sides’ armed forces
north and south of the 17th parallel respectively, and also for civilians who
wished to change their place of residence.) At the coal mines, I was told of a
strange incident just before the French pulled out to Haiphong, in which a
sharp-eyed youngster had noticed a mysterious visitor who fumbled around the
stacks of coal briquettes at the Campha storing area. At first he thought it
was just someone helping himself to fuel. Then he noticed that the visitor—who
always turned up in the evenings—was putting briquettes into the stacks. When
an advanced guard of Vietminh troops arrived he reported this. A watch was kept
and the visitor grabbed. His “briquettes” were the same size and shape but less
shiny than the others. They were found to be made of powerful explosives. Fed
into locomotive engines or powerhouse and factory furnaces, they would have
caused tremendous damage with no way of tracing the source.
The Campha culprit admitted that he was one of a
number of French undercover agents in the North who had been recruited by the
CIA immediately after the Geneva Agreements, whisked off to a U.S. base on a
Pacific island for a crash-course in espionage-sabotage techniques and
infiltrated back into the North through the Haiphong enclave. While I was at
Campha, teams were still patiently combing through the mountains of briquettes
to collect the explosive dummies. My Vietnamese friends asked me not to write
about it at the time because they did not want Lansdale to know how much they
already knew of his activities.
In his report, Lansdale recounts with some pride how
one of his teams “had spent the last days of Hanoi in contaminating the oil
supply of the bus company for a gradual wreckage of engines in the buses, in
taking the first actions of a delayed sabotage of the railroad (which required
teamwork with a CIA special technical team in Japan who performed their part
brilliantly) and in writing detailed notes of potential targets for future
paramilitary operations....” Lansdale complains that U.S. adherence to the
Geneva Agreements prevented his teams “from carrying out the active sabotage it
desired to do against the power plant, water facilities, harbor and bridge....”
(Those jobs were done later by the U.S. Air Force!!!) It is worth noting that
the sabotage of the bus company was specifically aimed at the French concept of
economic coexistence with the DRV, the bus company being owned and staffed by
French personnel. The “first actions” for delayed sabotage of the railroad were
undoubtedly the planting of the explosive “briquettes”!
“By 31 January [1955]” reported Lansdale, all
operational equipment of the Binh paramilitary group had been trans-shipped to
Haiphong from Saigon.... We had smuggled into Vietnam about eight and a half
tons of supplies for the paramilitary group. They included fourteen agent
radios, 300 carbines, 90,000 rounds of carbine ammunition, 50 pistols, 10,000
rounds of pistol ammunition and 300 pounds of explosives. Two and a half tons
were delivered to the Hao^ agents in Tonkin, while the remainder was cached along
the Red River by SMM (Saigon Military Mission which Lansdale headed. W.B.) with
the help of the Navy....”
A reason repeatedly given years later by Washington
for not engaging in negotiations to end America’s war in Vietnam was that they
could not place any reliance in “agreements reached with Communists.” Walter
Bedell-Smith at the closing session of the 1954 Geneva Conference solemnly
stated that: “The Government of the United States of America declares that with
regard to the aforesaid Agreements and paragraphs that: 1 ) it will refrain
from the threat or the use of force to disturb them, in accordance with Article
2 (Section 4) of the Charter of the United Nations.... 2) It would view any
renewal of the aggression in violation of the aforesaid Agreements with grave
concern and as seriously threatening international peace and security.”
“Haiphong was taken over by the Vietminh on 16 May,”
continues the Lansdale report. “Our Binh and northern Hao teams were in place,
completely equipped. It had taken a tremendous amount of hard work to beat the
Geneva deadline, to locate, exfiltrate, train, infiltrate, equip the men of
these two teams and have them in place ready for actions required against the
enemy....” In other words in place ready for “the use of force to disturb” the
Geneva Agreements.
For a comparison of attitudes, one only has to study
Ho Chi Minh’s “Appeal to the Vietnamese People” on June 22, 1954, the day after
the Geneva Cease-fire Accords were signed. It can be imagined that fulfilling
that part of the agreement calling for the evacuation of old Vietminh
resistance bases in the South—some of which the French had never been able to
penetrate from the start of the resistance struggle—called for a special effort
of discipline and self-sacrifice which only the authority of Ho Chi Minh could
make acceptable. Families would be separated for the two years until
reunification; the local people would lose the protection the Vietminh had for
so long provided. After explaining that the Geneva Agreements represented a “brilliant
victory” for the resistance struggle, Ho Chi Minh set the new task as: “to
struggle to consolidate peace; to realize national unity, independence and
democracy. To restore peace, the two parties must first of all observe the
cease-fire. For that, it is important that the armed forces of both parties
regroup in two different regions, which means that the limits of both
regrouping zones must be well marked. Such delimitation is a temporary measure,
a transition indispensable to the good implementation of the military agreement
and to the restoration of peace with a view to the nationwide elections for the
reunification of the country....” He explained that some areas occupied till then
by the French would now be in the liberated zone north of the 17th parallel and
some areas liberated in the South would fall under temporary French occupation.
“I am asking all our compatriots, combatants and
cadres, to strictly adhere to the political line drawn up by the Party and
Government and to correctly apply the measures taken in our struggle to
consolidate peace, realize unity, independence and democracy.
“All of you, truthful patriots, no matter to what
social class you belong, no matter what God you believe in, no matter what side
you were with, I invite you all to cooperate frankly in the struggle for the
sake of the people and of the Nation, for peace, for the unity, independence
and democracy of our beloved Vietnam....”
These were sacred instructions for every Vietminh
cadre. Some 140,000 of them—military and civilian—were then withdrawn to the
North, in accordance with the regrouping procedures agreed to at Geneva to
separate the combatant forces.
Whereas Ho Chi Minh accepted the Geneva Agreement as
a solemn international treaty to be respected no matter what the sacrifices
involved, Eisenhower treated it as a hindrance, to be circumvented by any means
whatsoever, to American global plans to “stop communism.” Thus the North
Vietnamese are right in seeing one single scenario from March 16, 1950—when the
U.S. aircraft-carrier Boxer and the destroyers Sticknel and Anderson, under 7th
Fleet Commander, Rear Admiral Arleigh Burke, anchored in Saigon Harbor in
support of the French, through the Lansdale “cloak and dagger” operations—right
up to the 1 1 million tons of bombs on Vietnam and U.S. aggression extended to
Laos and Cambodia. Developing variations of a single theme of U.S.
neo-colonialist aggression!
Another curious omission in the Pentagon Papers is
the extent of Pentagon responsibility, at the start at least, of the ill-fated
action at Dien Bien Phu. Some space is given to various plans like “Operation
Vulture,” aimed at saving the French from final defeat, but nothing is said of
the initial US encouragement to the French to jump headlong into the trap. For
the Vietnamese people, however, Dien Bien Phu was almost as much an American as
a French defeat. It was the wrecks of American planes, American tanks, American
artillery pieces that later littered the battlefield. The “Navarre Plan,” of
which Dien Bien Phu was a key element, had been approved in Washington and
extra funds earmarked accordingly. On November 23, 1953, General Thomas
Trapnell, chief of the US Military Aid and Advisory Group (MAAG) set up in
Saigon as far back as October 1950, inspected the Dien Bien Phu positions
together with Generals Henri Navarre, C-in-C of the French Expeditionary Corps,
and Rene Cogny, commanding French troops in the Tonkin area, where Dien Bien
Phu was situated. Trapnell made two more inspection trips (on December 19,
1953, with a group of US miliary officers, and on January 14, 1954) to check up
on the disposition of some $10 million worth of US equipment. On February 2,
General “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, C-in-C of US forces in the Pacific, paid a visit
and decided to appoint three American officers to remain on the spot and help
with the final preparations for the battle. (Dien Bien Phu was intended to be
the vital warwinning operation by which the elite troops of the Expeditionary
Corps, having been parachuted into Dien Bien Phu valley, deep inside
Vietminh-controUed territory, were to outflank and overrun the main Vietminh
base area in northern Tonkin.) Had Dien Bien Phu succeeded, much would no doubt
have been heard of the key role of the United States in the victory. As it was,
it was written off as a French military blunder!
A week before the Geneva Conference—by which time it
was clear that Dien Bien Phu was doomed, as Ho Chi Minh at his jungle
headquarters assured me it was right at the start of the battle—the Pentagon
Papers report the National Security Council as urging President Eisenhower to
warn the French that “US aid to France would automatically cease upon Paris’
conclusion of an unsatisfactory settlement” and that the United States should
approach the puppet governments of the three states of Indochina “with a view
to continuing the anti-Vietminh struggle in some other form, including
unilateral American involvement ‘if necessary.’ The NSC clearly viewed the
Indochina situation with extreme anxiety, and its action program amounted to
unprecedented proposals to threaten France with the serious repercussions of a
sell-out in Southeast Asia...” (Gravel edition, 1:117).
This was the spirit in which the USA approached the
Geneva Conference and the implementation of the Cease-fire Agreements. British
Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden is quoted as reveaHng that at one point, Walter
Bedell Smith, who headed the US delegation, showed him a “telegram from
President Eisenhower advising him to do everything in his power to bring the
conference to an end as rapidly as possible, on the grounds that the Communists
were only spinning things out to suit their own military purposes” (Gravel ed.,
I:138).
Much of the 58 pages of the chapter on the Geneva
Conference deals with the efforts of Dulles to wreck it; to avoid a cease-fire
at all costs in favor of international military intervention on the Korean
model. With the equivalent of the entire yearly output of officers from the St.
Cyr Academy—France’s West Point—being lost each year in Indochina, the French
began to wonder whether it was worth it. From the government down to the troops
dying in ricefield mud, it gradually began to dawn that France itself was
fighting and dying for the United States. The United States by the time of
Geneva was footing 80 percent of the bill but also, as former premier Paul
Reynaud cried out in the French National Assembly: “You Americans draw from
Indochina 89 percent of the natural rubber and 52 percent of the tin you need
for your consumption. Therefore on the material side of things it is for your
interests rather than ours that we are fighting for Indochina.”
Even Henri Navarre, the last would-be “war-winner”
general, wrote later that “the Americans helped us materially but on the other
hand they fought us morally. While they made use of the French ‘fist’—essential
to their anti-Communist game —they worked to undermine and even destroy our
interests.” (5) Navarre was lucky that the war ended before he suffered the
final humiliation of having the “Frenchification” label stuck to his war
efforts. But that he had virtually become an American mercenary, he had started
to realize. Despite the efforts of Dulles, agreement was reached at Geneva.
While most of the world heaved a great sigh of relief that one more shooting
war had been stopped, Lansdale went full steam ahead with his secret war
against the North; Dulles, the CIA and the Pentagon planned the full-scale
invasion, and while the US propaganda services shouted at “Communist bad faith,”
Dulles went ahead to set up the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) to
offset the Geneva Agreements and violate them by placing South Vietnam, Laos
and Cambodia under SEATO “protection.”
Meanwhile the United States started to take over from
the French in South Vietnam. A serious omission in the chapter on the “Origins
of the Insurgency in South Vietnam” is the failure to mention the US police
role and responsibility in putting the finger on those who had been active in
the anti-French resistance struggle. This was done within the framework of a “Denounce
Communists” campaign almost immediately after the cease-fire, with police teams
from Michigan State University helping behind the scenes, with everything from
up-to-date fingerprinting and electronic filing methods to torture gadgets used
in interrogation. Ngo Dinh Diem, set up in Saigon as premier at US insistence
just before the Cease-fire Agreements were concluded, took the view that the
resistance struggle had been “illegal”; thus all who helped were “criminals by
association.” Paragraph 14c of the Geneva Agreements, banning any form of
reprisals against those who had helped one side or the other during the war,
was ignored in the South from the start.
Although these operations were not directly under the
Pentagon, reactions to them certainly contributed to the “origins of the
insurgency.” A booklet issued by the Information Department of the DRV Minister
of Foreign Affairs in 1962 described the situation as early as 1955 as follows:
“USOM [US Operations Mission] spread its network of ‘advisers’ to all branches
of economy and finance. ‘Advisers’ were to be found in the ministries of
Economy, Finance, Agriculture, etc. They were also to be found in many central
offices. They participated in the elaboration of general programs and plans to
implement them. They controlled the carrying-out of those plans and, in
particular the use of the aid funds and the allotment of foreign currency.
Through USOM, the United States controlled all economic activities of the Ngo
Dinh Diem administration.
“Other branches of Diem’s administrative machinery
fell under the control of the Mission of the ‘Michigan State University’ (MSU),
a body which reminds one of the US espionage organization labeled ‘Free Europe’s
University.’ The MSU Mission had its ‘advisers’ in the branches of Education,
Labor, etc., but its main activities consisted in organizing the security and
police services, and training their personnel. General Lansdale, famous for his
implication in many coups d’etat and cases of espionage, was for a long time an
‘adviser’ to this mission, in charge of security and police....” By the end of
1954 the police were busy arresting and physically liquidating anyone in the
South named as having taken part in the resistance struggle.
One of the first cases of mass reprisals brought to
the notice of the International Control Commission (India as Chairman, Poland
and Canada) was at Binh Thanh village on the Mekong River. The ICC had been
informed that, early in December 1954, 74 villagers had been arrested on the
pretext that they had supported the resistance. Of these 24 were said to have
been executed, after which their bodies had been burned and the ashes thrown
into the Mekong. The ICC team arrived at Binh Thanh on December 8, and were
lodged in a motorboat anchored in the river. The village was occupied by
Diemist troops with machinegun posts at every crossroads. Contact with the
population was difficult but by the end of the day, seven witnesses had come
forward confirming there had been mass arrests and executions and threats of
death against any who testified before the ICC. Next morning the bodies of two
of the seven were found, including an old woman who had been beheaded and
disemboweled. The other five were under arrest. While the team members were
discussing their next move, three sampans appeared out of the mists, the
occupants asking if security could be guaranteed for themselves and others who
wanted to testify. A French liaison officer gave the necessary assurances. An
hour later a flotilla of 95 sampans appeared with almost 500 persons aboard.
They had been in hiding since the massacre, which they confirmed (9) with
minute details as to the story of the arrests, massacre and disposal of bodies.
This was one of scores of such cases of mass reprisals confirmed by the ICC.
I reported at the time (6) that “Up to the end of
July 1955... according to incomplete figures forwarded by General Nguyen Vo
Giap to the International Control Commission, there had been over 3,000 cases
of reprisals against former resistance supporters in South Vietnam, resulting
in over 6,000 killed, wounded and missing and more than 25,000 arrested....”
Added to these figures were an estimated 7,000 killed and twice as many wounded
when Diem’s troops attacked the pro-French armed sects, the Binh Xuyen in
Saigon and its outskirts and the Hoa Hao in the Mekong delta to the west.
On June 6, 1955, the government of the DRV had
declared its readiness “to open the Consultative Conference with the competent
representative authorities of the South, from July 20, 1955, onward, to discuss
the preparation of free general elections to be held over the entire territory
of Vietnam during the month of July 1956....” (As provided for in the Geneva
Agreements.)
The Pentagon Papers report that: “By the time the
deadlines for election con sultations fell due in July 1955, South Vietnam was
sovereign de facto as well as de jure, waxing strong with US aid, and France
was no longer in a position to exert strong influence on Diem’s political
actions. As early as January 1955, President Diem was stating publicly that he
was unlikely to proceed with the Geneva elections...” (Gravel ed., I:245).
As the French were more and more openly abdicating
their responsibilities and had not reacted to the June 6 Declaration, Hanoi
addressed a further note to the “Ngo Dinh Diem Administration” on July 19—a
very mild note pointing out that as both sides’ armed forces had completed
regroupment this had created “the necessary basis for the achievement in the
near future of a political settlement....” Until this time it should be
noted—something ignored by the Pentagon Papers—that the United States, the
French and Diem had enjoyed only advantages from the Geneva Agreements. Namely,
the French had been able to withdraw their forces intact from untenable
positions—after the Dien Bien Phu debacle—north of the 17th parallel; in return
the Vietminh forces had abandoned key base areas in the South; some 800,000
Catholics had been moved from the North to the South to bolster Diem’s
fanatically pro-Catholic regime. Now was to come the “pro” part of the quid pro
quo for the Vietminh—elections to unify the country. “The Government of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam,” continued the July 19 note, “suggests that you
nominate your representatives to hold, together with its own representatives,
the Consultative Conference as from July 20, 1955, onwards, as provided for in
the Geneva Agreements, at a place agreeable to both sides on Vietnamese
territory, in order to discuss the problem of national reunification through
free nationwide elections.”
The reply came next morning when military trucks
laden with uniformed youths arrived opposite the Majestic and Gallieni hotels,
the residential headquarters of the International Control Commission. Armed
with axes, pick-handles and machetes, they sacked the offices and private rooms
of ICC members as part of the celebration of Diem’s officially designated “day
of shame” (the first anniversary of the Geneva Agreements).
Dulles is quoted in the Pentagon Papers as having
commented on Diem’s rejection of the Consultations: “Neither the United States
Government nor the Government of Viet-Nam is, of course, a party to the Geneva
armistice agreements. We did not sign them, and the Government of Viet-Nam did
not sign them and, indeed, protested against them...” (Gravel ed., I:245). To
which the comment of the editors of the Papers is: “Thus, backed by the US,
Diem obdurately refused to open talks with the Hanoi government. He continued
to maintain that the Government of South Vietnam had not signed the Geneva Agreements
and thus was not bound by them.” In this way the Vietminh were cheated of the
full fruits of victory in their infinitely difficult and heroic struggle for
independence and the foundation was laid for the terrible war that followed. Diem,
put into power by the United States and objectively speaking only there because
the Vietminh had beaten the French, stepped up his attempts to exterminate the
former resistance activists and their supporters: The ferocity of the repression
was in direct proportion to the military strength the United States put at his
disposal.
Ho Chi Minh had appealed for political struggle to demand
the 1956 elections, so the political repression was also directed against any
who agitated for the elections or anything else connected with implementation
of the Geneva Agreements. To support the latter became a “crime.” Committees
set up in defense of peace and the Geneva Agreements were dissolved, leading
members—including the head of the Saigon-Cholon committee, the lawyer Nguyen
Huu Tho—were arrested. (Nguyen Huu Tho was later rescued from prison by NFL
guerrillas and became President of the National Liberation Front.) Those who
took advantage of the sections of the Geneva Agreements guaranteeing full
political freedoms and who tried to use these freedoms in defense of the
Agreements were marked down, if not for immediate arrest, for arrest and extermination
later.
“The DRV repeatedly tried to engage the Geneva
machinery, forwarding messages to the Government of South Vietnam in July 1955,
May and June 1956, March 1958, July 1959 and July 1960, proposing consultations
to negotiate ‘free general elections by secret ballot,’ and to liberalize
North-South relations in general,” comments the Pentagon Papers on this aspect
of US-Saigon policy. “Each time the GVN replied with disdain, or with silence.
The 17th parallel, with its demilitarized zone on either side, became de facto
an international boundary, and—since Ngo Dinh Diem’s rigid refusal to traffic
with the North excluded all economic exchanges and even an interstate postal
agreement—one of the most restricted boundaries in the world. The DRV appealed
to the UK and the USSR as co-chairmen of the Geneva Conference to no avail. In
January 1956, on DRV urging. Communist China requested another Geneva
Conference to deal with the situation. But the Geneva Co-Chairmen, the USSR and
the UK, responded only by extending the functions of the International Control
Commission beyond its 1956 expiration date.... If the political mechanism for
reunifying Vietnam in 1956 proved impractical, the blame lies at least in part
with the Geneva conferees themselves, who postulated an ideal political
settlement incompatible with the physical and psychological dismemberment of
Vietnam they themselves undertook in July 1954” (Gravel ed., I:247). This
comment is typical of many such fatuous conclusions by the compilers. They might
at least have added: “The major part of the blame however lies with the United
States which set out to wreck the Geneva Agreements from the start, especially
any provisions which would have extended ‘communist control’ south of the
demarcation line.” Diem was a US creation, fed, financed and armed by the
United States, with Americans controlling every key aspect of policymaking and
implementation.
Repression and massacre became the order of the day.
Overcrowded jails could not house the victims. Presidential Order No. 6, of
January 11, 1956, provided in Article 1 that “Awaiting the restoration of peace
and order, individuals considered dangerous to national defense and common
security may, on executive order taken by the President of the Republic as proposed
by the Minister of the Interior, be confined to a concentration camp, or forced
to reside, or deported far from their dwelling place or far from fixed
locations, or subjected to administrative control...” (7) with appropriate
penalties stipulated for those who evaded the concentration camps and controls.
Conditions in the jails were later described by
deputy Tran Ngoc Ban to the South Vietnamese National Assembly on January 3,
1958, as follows:
Let us take one cell among so many others at the Gia Dinh
prison. Forty-five feet long by a little less than eleven feet wide. In this
area are generally packed 150 detainees. Simple arithmetic shows us that there
is room for three persons per square meter. It is in this place that detainees sleep,
eat, wash themselves and ease their bowels. A bucket with a lid is put in a
corner of the room for that purpose. It suffices that each of the prisoners
uses it once a day for five minutes and the bucket would remain open for twelve
hours....
As for possibilities of sitting or lying down...
squatting they have just enough room; sitting cross-legged they are very
cramped. At night they can just sleep lying with their knees under their chin.
So a quarter of the detainees have to stand up to allow the others to stretch out
for a moment. It is a fraternal gesture but also a necessity. Because of the
sweltering heat... many detainees are unable to bear wearing a garment and
remain half-naked. They must live day and night in this room and only go out into
the courtyard once a day for a meal, which is taken outside even in rainy
weather. Medicines hardly exist... (8)
For having the courage to reveal this, Tran Ngoc Ban,
M.P., was arrested and sent to join the inmates whose fate he had described. He
was talking of those fortunate enough to have escaped the extermination squads
that were hard at work physically liquidating what were in fact political
opponents of the Diem regime.
During the first year of its activities, the
International Control Commission investigated 40 violations of Article 14C in
the South, some of them involving the massacre of hundreds of people. The
balance of that first year of “peace” in the South was 16 violations confirmed,
13 investigations completed but findings not published, 8 cases under investigation
and 3 cases in which evidence was insufficient to prove violations. There were
no violations of 14C in the North. Not included in the list was a case on July
7, 1955, in which a battalion of Diem’s security forces surrounded the tiny
hamlets of Tan Lap and Tan Hiep in Quang Ngai province—a guerrilla area in the
resistance struggle. Every man, woman and child at Tan Lap was killed and all
the males at Tan Hiep on the evening of July 7. Five days later the security
troops returned to Tan Hiep, arrested 15 women, raped them, then took them to a
neighboring hamlet of An Che and killed them. The following day they killed the
remaining three adults and 15 children at Tan Hiep. Not a living soul was left
in these two hamlets — 30 men, 30 women and 32 children had been massacred.
Detailed reports were made to the ICC, but investigation of the case was
blocked by the Diemist authorities.
By early 1956, Diem had almost completely paralyzed
the work of the ICC, as the following report shows: “Mobile Team 117 conducted
an investigation asked for by the People’s Army of Vietnam, Note No.
141-CT/I/B, dated March 2, 1956, on the massacre by the South Vietnamese
authorities of 21 persons buried alive at the marketplace at Cho Duoc and
reprisals against 14 other persons of the villages of An Tra and Tan Luu (Quang
Nam province) but the interested party refused to allow the Commission to have
a mobile Team investigate this case.” (9)
“Security was the focus of US aid,” reports the
Pentagon Papers dealing with this early period. “More than 75 percent of the
economic aid the US provided in the same period went into the GVN military
budget; thus at least $8 out of every $10 of aid provided Vietnam went directly
toward security. In addition, other amounts of nominally economic aid (e.g.,
that for public administration) went toward security forces, and aid for
agriculture and transportation principally funded projects with strategic
purposes and with an explicit military rationale. For example, a 20-mile
stretch of highway from Saigon to Bien Hoa, built at Gen. Williams’ instance
for specifically military purposes, received more US economic aid than all
funds provided for labor, community development, social welfare, health, and
education in the years 1954-1961” (Gravel ed., I:268). Would US taxpayers be
proud of this use of their taxes?
If one compares the reality of the unilateral war
against the people of South Vietnam waged against an unarmed population for its
political opposition to a fascist regime with the description given by that
semiotficial apologist for US Vietnam policies, Douglas Pike, then one has some
measure of the deceit of public opinion. Pike is trying to make the point that
the NLF was entirely a creation of Hanoi. “Of necessity it must have been
created in Hanoi and imported,” the Pentagon Papers credit Pike with writing. “A
revolutionary organization must build; it begins with persons suffering genuine
grievances, who are slowly organized and whose militancy gradually increases
until a critical mass is reached and the revolution explodes. Exactly the
reverse was the case with the NLF. It sprang full-blown into existence and then
was fleshed out. The grievances were developed or manufactured almost as a
necessary afterthought” (Gravel ed., I:346).
Reality was that from 1959 onwards, especially after
the passing of Law 10/59, providing for death or life imprisonment for a wide
range of offenses against the government, there were spontaneous, sporadic and
unorganized acts of resistance by those who “preferred to die on our feet
rather than on our knees” as one of them expressed it to me. Later these acts
became more generalized and to coordinate and give correct leadership the NLF
was formed in December 1960. By the time the NLF’s first congress was held
(February 16 to March 3, 1962), and according to incomplete figures compiled by
NLF committees at provincial and district levels: 105,000 former resistance
supporters had been killed, 350,000 at that moment were being held in 874
prisons and concentration camps, including over 6,000 children, many of them
born in prison. These are what Pike describes as “grievances manufactured as an
afterthought.”
If I have dealt at length and in detail with some
aspects of the early years after the Geneva Agreements, this is because there
are vast gaps in the Pentagon Papers’ account of the period which have to be
sketched in to understand the monstrous injustice done the Vietnamese people,
even before the US invasion with combat troops in 1965 and the start of the
bombings of the North. They were cheated of the fruits of their struggle
against the French, essentially because of US intervention. It is against this
background and the merciless, barbarous years “of the long knives,” that the
people of the South took to arms to defend man’s most ancient rights to defend
his life and home. Some knowledge of what went on in this period is helpful,
incidentally, in understanding why the DRV-PRG negotiators in Paris are tough,
and determined that this time they really get what they fought for—total
independence on terms which can never again be violated.
The North Vietnamese date the next phase of US
intervention—preparing for and waging “special war”—from the arrival of the
Staley Mission in mid-June 1961. President of the Stanford Research Institute,
economist by profession, Eugene Staley was soon dabbling in affairs which had
little to do with his academic qualifications. His approach may be judged from
the following passage quoted in the Pentagon Papers: “Vietnam is today under attack
in a bitter, total struggle which involves its survival as a free nation. Its
enemy, the Viet Cong, is ruthless, resourceful and elusive. This enemy is
supplied, reinforced, and centrally directed by the international communist
apparatus operating through Hanoi. To defeat it requires the mobiHzation of the
entire economic, military, psychological, and social resources of the country
and vigorous support from the United States...” (Gravel ed., II:63). (It is
worth noting that four months later the NIE—National Intelligence Estimate—gave
the total number of guerrillas as 17,000, of whom “80-90 percent had been
locally recruited and... little evidence that the VC relied on external
supplies....” The Diem army at the time was 170,000 with another 80,000 paramilitary
units. For the military muscle of the “international communist apparatus”
17,000 guerrillas, many of them armed only with clubs, hoes and bicycle chains,
etc., at the time, seems modest to say the least. John Kenneth Galbraith,
visiting the South a month after the NIE report, believed the number of
guerrillas was closer to 10,000.) Staley recommended building the regular Diem
army up to 200,000, to be increased later to 270,000. The Pentagon Papers
dismiss the Staley report as “not much more than a piece of paper” and say the
President agreed with its three basic tenets: (a) Security requirements must,
for the present, be given first priority; (b) military operations will not
achieve lasting results unless economic and social programs are continued and
accelerated; (c) it is our joint interest to accelerate measures to achieve a
self-sustaining economy and a free and peaceful society in Viet-Nam.”
Hanoi’s information about the Staley Mission was much
more complete and reflects another of those important omissions of the Pentagon
Papers. On February 28, 1962, the Foreign Ministry of the DRV published the
following details:
Three phases are contemplated in the Staley Plan:
First Phase: “Pacification” of South Vietnam within
18 months and “establishment of bases” in North Vietnam.
Second Phase: Economic rehabilitation and
reinforcement of the South Vietnam economy, increase of sabotage in North
Vietnam.
Third Phase: Development of the South Vietnam
economy, and offensive against North Vietnam.
For the first phase, considered an extremely
important one, Staley has laid down a series of measures, including:
Increase of the strength of the South Vietnam regular
army from 150,000 to 170,000 men by the end of 1961.
Increase of the strength of the civil guard from
68,000 to 100,000 men and turning it into regular forces.
Increase of the strength of the police from 45,000 to
90,000 men.
Reinforcing the “self-defense” corps in the villages
to the extent required.
Regroupment of villages and concentration of the
people into “prosperity zones” and “strategic hamlets” which are actually
camouflaged concentration camps; establishment of a no-man’s land starting from
the provisional military demarcation line and running along the frontier
between South Vietnam on the one hand, and Laos and Cambodia on the other,
setting up of 100 new “prosperity zones” in the delta of the Mekong, which are
to be imbricated with a network of “strategic hamlets” fenced in by bamboo hedges,
barbed wire and control posts, for the purpose of concentrating nearly
1,000,000 peasants.
Increase of the aid to the Ngo Dinh Diem
Administration to carry out the above-mentioned plan. (10)
Far from being “not much more than a piece of paper”
this was the blueprint for a vast military campaign, very soon to be run by the
United States itself, to try and herd the whole of South Vietnam’s peasantry
into 16,000 concentration camps disguised as “strategic hamlets.” I published
details of the Staley Plan — and the stepped-up dollar allocations to finance
it—at the time in newspaper articles, also in a book, with the comment that “no
peasants in the world had so many dollars per capita lavished on their
extermination.” Also that “General Maxwell Taylor was sent from October 10 to
25 (1961) to work out supplementary details of the Staley Plan in view of a
decision taken a few days earlier by the National Security Council on direct US
intervention....” (11) Staley’s monstrous “strategic hamlet” program which
brought the whole of the peasantry out in armed revolt, is dismissed as “economic
and social programs” in the Pentagon Papers and the consequences as “grievances...
manufactured almost as a necessary afterthought” by Pike.
One of Maxwell Taylor’s contributions which, if Hanoi
knew about at the time, did not reveal, was to start direct US military
intervention camouflaged as a “humanitarian” Task Force of 6,000 to 8,000 men
for “flood relief.” In an “eyes only for the President” cable from the
Philippines (presumably on October 25) Taylor reports that “the interim
Communist goal—en route to total takeover— appears to be a neutral Southeast
Asia, detached from US protection. This strategy is well on the way to success
in Vietnam....” To counter this “dangerous and immoral” possibility (to quote
from John Foster Dulles’ characterization of neutrality), Taylor recommended as
his first point that “upon request from the Government of Vietnam to come to
its aid in resisting the increasing aggressions of the Viet-Cong and in repairing
the ravages of the Delta flood which, in combination, threaten the lives of its
citizens and the security of the country, the US Government offer to join the
GV in a massive joint effort as part of a total mobilization of GVN resources
to cope with both the Viet- Cong (VC) and the ravages of the flood.... In
support of the foregoing broad commitment... the US Government will engage in a
joint survey of the conditions in the provinces to assess the social,
political, intelligence and military factors bearing on the prosecution of the
counterinsurgency...” etc., etc. Taylor outlines a most comprehensive plan for
stepped-up intelligence and actual military operations over the whole of South
Vietnam, always under the guise of “flood relief.” In a second “eyes only for
the President” cable apparently sent the same day, Taylor emphasizes the
necessity for speed—otherwise “the possibility of emphasizing the humanitarian
mission will wane....” With the Taylor mission was William Jorden of the State
Department, (12) who summed up his impression of the underlying reasons for the
situation: “Intrigue, nepotism and even corruption might be accepted, for a
time, if combined with efficiency and visible progress. When they accompany
administrative paralysis and steady deterioration, they become intolerable....”
(Gravel ed., II:95.)
President Kennedy did not accept the “Flood Task
Force” idea but did opt to send in US military personnel by the end of 1961.
Decisive probably in the decision, if not the manner of intervention, was a
memo by Defense Secretary McNamara of November 8, supporting Taylor’s
recommendations. There is a fascinating estimation of McNamara’s that “Hanoi
and Peiping may intervene openly...” but even so “the maximum US forces
required on the ground in Southeast Asia will not exceed six divisions or about
205,000 men...” (Gravel ed., II:108). (In his jungle headquarters some years
later, discussing the possibility of the commitment of US ground forces, the
NLF president Nguyen Huu Tho told me that he estimated that if the United
States decided to intervene, they would probably put in around 500,000 troops.
This was at the Lunar New Year 1964, but the NLF president did not have the
benefit of McNamara’s computers!) However it proves that the Pentagon and White
House were well aware in early November 1961 that they had embarked on the
step-by-step course of full-scale warfare in South Vietnam.
In order to justify the despatch of the first troops,
Jorden was given the task of rushing out a “white paper” to prove that the
whole problem in the South was “aggression and subversion” from the North.
There is a Rusk-McNamara recommendation to the President, dated November 11,
point five of which proposes that as the US military personnel to be sent would
be a violation of the Geneva Agreements, the government “publish the ‘Jorden
report’ as a US ‘white paper,’ transmitting it as simultaneously as possible to
the governments of all countries with which we have diplomatic relations,
including the Communist states...” (Gravel ed., II:115). This was done. When it
came out—as a “Blue Book”—Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General, is reported to
have called Jorden in and said, “Bill—there is not a single fact in that report
that would stand up in a court of law.”
Confirmation that Hanoi’s information on the Staley
Plan was correct was soon to come in operational terms and as regards the Third
Phase of an offensive against the North, there is a passage in Maxwell Taylor’s
full report of November 3, in which—waxing more and more enthusiastic as he
moves from “flood control” to broader prospects—he writes: “It is clear to me
that the time may come in our relations to Southeast Asia when we must declare
our intention to attack the source of guerrilla aggression in North Vietnam and
impose on the Hanoi Government a price for participating in the current war
which is commensurate with the damage being inflicted on its neighbors to the
South...” (Gravel ed., II:98).
It is generally considered that US intervention
started on December 11, 1961, when two helicopter companies of 36 Shawnee
helicopters and 370 officers and men of the US army together with 7 T-28
trainer-combat planes were landed in Saigon. But Hanoi reported that a squadron
of “B-26” bombers “and several hundred US officers, NCOs and troops arrived at
the Bien Hoa air base on November 10, 1961.
While the State Department was trying to peddle the
myth of North Vietnam’s “aggression and subversion” against the South to cover
up the start of its own war of aggression against the whole Vietnamese people,
there was very real “aggression and subversion” being carried out by
CIA-directed operations against the North. “On July 24, 1961, General Arthur D.
Trudeau, Chief of Research and Development of the US armed forces, a specialist
in ‘activities of subversion and sabotage’ in the socialist countries, author
of a plan for sabotage and subversion in Eastern Europe and North Vietnam,’
came in person to South Vietnam,” (13) reports a document published by the
Press and Information Department of the DRV’s foreign ministry, in 1964. “Since
then,” continues this document, “under the guidance of the CIA, the armed
forces of the United States and its agents, starting from South Vietnam and
sometimes from US bases in the Pacific, have made frequent intrusions into the
air space and territorial waters of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. (14) Spy
commandos, direcdy organized, trained and equipped by US specialists, have been
repeatedly smuggled in groups into North Vietnam by land, by sea and by air for
the purposes of espionage, provocation and sabotage.
“They are usually South Vietnam Army non-commissioned
officers and men born in North Vietnam, or youths who had been forcibly
evacuated from North to South Vietnam by the French Union Forces. They are well
acquainted with various regions in North Vietnam, where some of them also have
relatives. They had been enlisted by the US intelligence agencies and their men
into ‘Special Force’ units under Colonel Lam Son, who had replaced Colonel Le
Quang Tung. (15) They underwent training in the centers of Nha Trang, Tourane
(Da nang) or Saigon, and in some cases in Taiwan, Guam or Okinawa. They were initiated
into the secret of the job by US mihtary and inteUigence experts.
“They were subsequently sent to North Vietnam with
instructions to engage, depending on the cases, in various activities:
collection of intelligence data — military, political, economic and otherwise,
psychological warfare: distribution of leaflets, dissemination of false and
tendentious news, kidnapping or assassination of officials, army men and
civilians with a view to extorting intelligence data or creating an atmosphere
of insecurity, sabotage of defense installations, warehouses, factories and
workshops, mines, bridges, roads, railways and setting up of local spy-rings or
hotbeds of armed activities particularly in remote hilly areas, with the
specific aim of eventually starting ‘guerrilla’ operations in North Vietnam. ‘To
achieve the above objectives, the United States and the South Vietnam Administration
have undertaken large-scale smuggling of spy-commandos into North Vietnam,
heedless of their agents’ fate, the successful outcome of only one operation
out of a hundred being already, in their eyes, a success.
“But, in the face of the vigilance and the patriotism
being displayed by the people of North Vietnam, they will reap only bitter
setbacks. The US news agency UPI itself was compelled to admit openly on
February 22, 1964, that ‘about 85 to 90 percent (of course these figures are
below the actual ones—Ed.) of the South Vietnamese guerrilla specialists
airdropped or otherwise smuggled into North Vietnam were either killed or
captured.’... (16)
“In spite of many serious defeats in South Vietnam
and the shameful failure of their provocation and sabotage vis-a-vis the DRV,
the United States and the South Vietnam administration are still contemplating ‘major
sabotage raids which would have a quick and serious effect’...”
The booklet then lists 62 cases of air violations,
usually associated with the dropping of commandos or attempts to establish
air-ground liaison with those already dropped and 22 naval operations for the
same purpose.
Such groups were almost always rounded up within
hours of being dropped or landed. The Foreign Ministry documents cite many
specific cases. For example:
At about 1 A.M. on April 13, 1963, an aircraft coming
from South Vietnam intruded into the airspace of North Vietnam and dropped a
group of spy-commandos on a hilly area northwest of Kien Thanh commune at the limits
of Ha Bac and Lang Son provinces. Immediately after the landing and before they
had time to come into contact with one another and to hide their equipment
underground, the spy-commandos were rounded up by the local security forces,
militia and people. In their stampede, they left behind three cases of weapons,
signal equipment, instruments for sabotage, food rations and medicines, six
spare parachutes, six plastic hats and parachutists’ cotton-padded attire.
Continuing their pursuit, the local people and armed forces successively
arrested five spy-commandos and shot dead a sixth one who had tried to oppose
resistance, and who... was subsequently identified as Luong Van Pho, sabotage
agent...
They have been sent to North Vietnam with the
following task:
—to sabotage defense installations, economic
establishments, warehouses, bridges and means of transport and communication;
—to collect intelligence information;
—to kidnap and assassinate officials, armymen and
simple civilians;
—to establish spy-rings, to corrupt and sow
dissension among the various nationalities in the area.
The ringleader was sentenced to death in a public
trial on July 10, 1963, in Lang Son, the others to from 10 years to life
imprisonment. Typical of the statements was that of Than Van Kinh, head of the
group and sentenced to life imprisonment. Apart from the technical details of
the mission, he testified that he and the others “had been trained by US
advisers in intelligence work, the use of mines and explosives for sabotage
purposes, parachute-jumping, the kidnapping of officials, etc. Before leaving
for North Vietnam, we were briefed by two US advisers and Captain Anh, who
assigned to us the following task: to sabotage the railways and National Road
No. 1, railway stations, bridges and sluices, water tanks and locomotives, etc....”
Four months before the Taylor mission and Jorden’s
fable, an American plane had dropped a group of spy commandos in Quang Binh
province—just north of the 17th parallel—and a month later—just after midnight
on July 2, 1961, a C47 was shot down in Kim Son district, Ninh Binh province
and all members of a group of 10 commandos were captured. (One had bailed out
and landed on the roof of the home of the secretary of the local branch of the
Communist [Lao Dong] party!)
These activities are not revealed in the Pentagon
Papers, although they constitute “acts of war” under internationally accepted
definitions of the term.
In a chronology of events (Gravel ed., III:117),
there is reference to a NSAM 52 (National Security Action Memorandum) of May
11, 1963, authorizing “CIA-sponsored covert operations against NVN,” and to the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, on September 3, 1963, having “approved this program for
non-attributable ‘hit-and-run’ operations against NVN, supported by US military
advisory material and training assistance.” Again on November 23 of the same
year there is a NSAM 273, authorizing “planning for specific covert operations,
graduated in intensity, against the DRV.”
There is also a rather wistful admission of failure,
in a conversation between Secretary McNamara, Maxwell Taylor and General Nguyen
Khanh, then in power in Saigon, in May 1964. Khanh was pushing for “attacks on
the North.” Taylor “asked how best to attack the North. It had been noted that
small-scale operations had had no success...” (Gravel ed., III:72).
I find no reference in the Pentagon Papers to anyone
posing the question as to why it was the ill-armed “Vietcong” guerrillas were
able to flourish in the South, protected by the local population, while the
life or liberty of superbly equipped agents dropped into the North could
usually be counted in hours!
Finally the Pentagon Papers version of the Tonkin
Gulf “incident” (which provided President Johnson with his blank check to bomb
the North and invade the South) has to be compared with the North Vietnamese
version. In the section “Military Pressures Against North Vietnam, February
1964-January 1965” (Gravel ed., III: 106-109) there is reference to “pressure
planning” and to plans for mounting “overt coercive pressures against the
North.” US ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Johnson’s national
security adviser Walt Rostow are quoted as urging “increased military measures”
and it is revealed that “during the third quarter of 1964, a consensus
developed within the Johnson Administration that some form of continual overt
pressures mounting in severity against North Vietnam would soon be required....
“Although it did not take the form of decision, it
was agreed that the US should at an unspecified date in the future begin an
incremental series of gradually mounting strikes against North Vietnam. The
only real questions were precisely what actions should be taken and when?...
“The key events in this period were the Tonkin Gulf
incidents of August 2nd and 4th and the US reprisal on North Vietnam PT boats
and bases on August 5th. The explanation for the DRV attack on US ships remains
puzzling.... The US reprisal represented the carrying out of recommendations
made to the President by his principal advisers earlier that summer and
subsequently placed on the shelf....” The report then goes on to describe how
President Johnson used the incidents to have his blank-check resolution passed
almost unanimously on August 7, 1964.
Although this report is rather coy as to the actual
background to the Tonkin Bay “incident,” it is less so as to the Pentagon frame
of mind afterwards. It would have been more realistic had McNamara’s
researchers related this frame of mind to the “incident” itself. The “limited
and fitting response” to use President Johnson’s description of the bombing of
North Vietnam’s northern coastal areas on August 5, 1964, brought the “pressures-against-the-North
thinking to a head in the strategy meetings of the principals on September 7th,”
according to the Pentagon Papers’ version. “One program proposal came from the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. It was a repeat of the 94-target list program which the JCS
had recommended on August 26th. The JCS called for deliberate attempts to
provoke the DRV into taking acts which could then be answered by a systematic US
air campaign (My italics. W.B.). The JCS argued that such actions were now ‘essential
to preventing complete collapse of the US position in the RVN and SEA,’ because
‘continuation of present or foreseeable programs limited to the RVN will not
produce the desired result.’ The Chiefs were supported by ISA (17) in their
provocation approach” (Gravel ed., III:110).
The DRV version of the “Gulf of Tonkin incident”
makes it quite clear that the “provocation approach” was the cause and not a
result, of the incident.
A rough timetable of the background to the “Tonkin
Gulf incident” is as follows:
2 Mar 1964 The Joint Chiefs of Staff outline their
proposal for punitive action to halt Northern support for the VC insurgency.
Bombing is specifically called for. [It is worth noting that the proposal to
bomb the North was linked to the failure of the Saigon regime to implement US
policies in the South and the resistance of the peasants to the “Strategic
Hamlet” program. It had the logic of the sort of blind reprisals against
hostages that the Nazis used in occupied Europe every time one of their
gauleiters or lesser stars was assassinated. There was a parallel in late
December 1971, when President Nixon ordered a series of massive air attacks
against the DRV because of successes of the resistance forces in Laos and
Cambodia!]
14 Mar 1964 The JCS... reiterate their views of 2
March that a program of actions against the North is required to effectively
strike at the sources of the insurgency.
17 Mar The JCS are authorized to begin planning
studies for striking at the sources of insurgency in the DRV.
4 Apr In a letter to [Ambassador] Lodge, Bundy (18) asks
him to comment on a scenario for mobilizing domestic US political support for
action against the DRV.
17-20 Apr Secretary of State Rusk and party visit
Saigon.... At the April 19 meeting with the Country Team, much of the
discussion is devoted to the problem of pressures against the North. (19)
15 Jun W. P. Bundy memo to SecState and SecDef....
One of the important themes is that an act of irreversible US commitment might
provide the necessary psychological support to get real reform and
effectiveness from the GVN. (Again the theme that the North is considered
hostage for reprisals in order to get a more stable government in the South.
W.B.)
19 Jul In a public speech, Khanh [General Nguyen
Khanh, the US “strong man” at the top in Saigon at that time. W.B.] refers to
the “March to the North.” In a separate statement to the press, General [Nguyen
Cao] Ky also refers to the “march North” [In more detailed references to these
and subsequent such statements it transpires that the “March to the North”
means US “reprisal bombings.” W.B.].
2 Aug The destroyer USS Maddox is attacked in the
Tonkin Gulf by DRV patrol craft while on a DE SOTO patrol off the DRV coast.
Several patrol boats sunk. (20)
4 Aug In a repetition of the 2 August incident, the
Maddox and the C. Turner Joy are attacked. After strenuous efforts to confirm
the attacks, the President authorizes reprisal air strikes against the North.
5 Aug US aircraft attack several DRV patrol boat
bases, destroying ships and facilities.
7 Aug At the time of the attacks, the President
briefed leaders of Congress and had a resolution of support for US policy
introduced. It is passed with near-unanimity by both Houses.
11 Aug The President signs the Tonkin Gulf Resolution
and pledges full support for the GVN.
18 Sep The first resumed DE SOTO patrol comes under
apparent attack. To avoid future incidents, the President suspends the patrols.
[With the blank check already in his pocket, Johnson no longer needed the
provocations of the DE SOTO patrols. W.B.]
The DRV claims that a series of provocations started
on July 30 at 11:40 p.m. when US and South Vietnamese warships shelled the
North Vietnamese islands of Hon Ngu and Hon Me, four and twelve kilometers
respectively off the coast of Thanh Hoa province. From July 31 to August 2, the
destroyer Maddox “operated very near the Vietnamese coast in Quang Binh, Ha
Tinh, Nghe An and Thanh Hoa provinces.” (21)
“On August 1, at 11:45 a.m., four T-28s coming from
the direction of Laos bombed and strafed the Nam Can frontier post—7 kilometers
from the Vietnam- Laos border—which was visibly flying the flag of the DRV and
also Noong De village, about 20 kms from the same border. Both places are
situated far inside Vietnamese territory and belong to Ky Son district, Nghe An
province....” The raid against Nam Can was repeated the following day with 7
T-28s and AD-6s, also coming from the direction of Laos, according to the
foreign ministry report, which continues:
“On August 2, at 3 p.m. [local time], while in
Vietnamese waters between Hon Me and Lach Truong [Thanh Hoa] the Maddox,
encountering patrol boats of the DRV, opened fire at them. Confronted with such
brazen provocation, the Vietnamese boats had to take defensive action to
safeguard national sovereignty and territorial waters, protect the fishermen,
and finally drove the intruder out of Vietnamese waters.
“On August 3, at 11 p.m. [local time], under the
cover of the Ticonderoga task group stationed in the offing, four warships—two
small and two big—intruded into Vietnamese waters, and opened fire with 40 mm guns
and 12.7 mm machine guns at Ron and Deo Ngang areas [Quang Binh province on the
North Vietnamese mainland. W.B.].
“On August 5, 1964, from 12:30 to 5 p.m. (local
time), Skyhawk, Crusader and Phantom jets and Skyraider aircraft taking off
from the carriers Constellation and Ticonderoga anchored in the Gulf of Bac Bo
(Tonkin Gulf) came in many waves to bomb and rocket a number of places along
the North Vietnamese coast, the vicinity of Hong Gai town, Lach Truong, the
vicinity of Ben Thuy — Vinh, the mouth of the Gianh River....” The events
between July 30 and August 2 were also described in a statement issued by a
spokesman for the High Command of the Vietnam People’s Army, on August 4.
The DRV Memorandum denied as a “farce” the charge
that it attacked US destroyers on the night of August 4, describing the charge
as “an out-and-out fabrication,” and makes the following points:
President Johnson said that following the August 2,
1964, “attack” in the Gulf of Bac Bo, he ordered the destroyer Turner Joy—then
in the Philippines— to join the Maddox. In fact at 7:30 p.m. on August 2, the
Turner Joy was already in the Gulf of Bac Bo, east of Deo Ngang. In other
words, it must have received the relevant instructions prior to “the first
attack” on the Maddox.
President Johnson also said that following the “second
attack,” in the night of August 4, 1964, he ordered the aircraft carrier
Constellation to sail to the Gulf of Bac Bo as reinforcement to the US Navy
there. Actually the Constellation left Hong Kong in the morning of August 4,
1964. This was confirmed by its commander, Captain Frederic A. Bardshar, at his
August 10, 1964 press conference. (22) in the evening of August 4, 1964, i.e.,
prior to the “second attack,” the carrier was already in the Gulf of Bac Bo.
Judging by President Johnson’s assertions, it would
appear that the destroyer Maddox was the only US warship in the Gulf of Bac Bo
in the evening of August 2, As a matter of fact, four destroyers were operating
at that time along the North Vietnamese coast, namely the Maddox, the Turner
Joy, the Samuel Moore and the Berkeley.
In the evening of August 4 and prior to the “second
attack,” 11 US warships belonging to the 7th Fleet were already on the spot.
Ticonderoga task group with the aircraft-carrier Ticonderoga, destroyers Samuel
Moore, Edison, Harry Hubbard and Berkeley, Constellation task group with the aircraft-carrier
Constellation, destroyers Preston and Fechteler, and the USS Gridley; and
finally the two destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy.
According to President Johnson’s August 4, 1964,
statement, the air strike against North Vietnam was decided following the “second
attack” on US warships in the Gulf of Bac Bo.
“But, according to the Reuter correspondent who
attended the August 10, 1964, press conference aboard a ship of the 7th Fleet,
the pilot of an A-4 jet based on the carrier Constellation—whose name was not
given—said that the pilots were informed of the attack against North Vietnam
back in the morning of August 4, that is in the evening of August 3 (Washington
time)....
The August 5, 1964, air raid was not an isolated
action: on the contrary, it came in the wake of a series of other US war acts
against the DRV....”
The Memorandum then quotes a DRV government
declaration of August 6, 1964, that: “The air strafing and bombing of August 5,
1964, are obviously a premeditated act of war within the US Government’s plan
for intensified provocation and sabotage against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam...
an extremely serious act of war... which constitutes a blatant violation of
international law and the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Indo-China, and adds to the
danger of extended war in Indo-China and South-East Asia.”
All that has happened since, including the
revelations of the Pentagon Papers —inadequate as they are in many
instances—confirm how completely accurate was this immediate evaluation of the “Tonkin
incident” by the government of the DRV.
From the August 5 air attacks to operations “Flaming
Dart”—a so-called “reprisal raid” on Febuary 8, 1965, for a guerrilla attack on
a US helicopter base as Pleiku, and “Rolling Thunder”—the code name for the
systematic bombing of North Vietnam, starting March 2, 1965, was but a short
step once Congress had given Johnson power to do what he liked in Southeast
Asia. That by this time he was looking for pretexts to put into effect
decisions taken months earlier, is documented in a Chronology (Gravel ed.,
III:275ff.) which reveals that it was decided on January 28, to resume the
provocative DE SOTO patrols “on or about 3 February” and that on January 29,
the “Joint Chiefs of Staff urged again that a strong reprisal action be taken
immediately after the next DRV/VC provocation. In particular, they propose
targets and readiness to strike should the forthcoming resumption of the DE
SOTO patrols be challenged.”
The DE SOTO patrols were, in fact, called off
temporarily because Soviet premier Kosygin was due to arrive within a few days
in Hanoi. A routine guerrilla attack on a US base, however, was used as the
pretext to set “Flaming Dart” into operation, and five days later Johnson
approved “Rolling Thunder.” Within six days of the start of “Rolling Thunder”
the first marines started disembarking at Danang and the United States was
fully committed to a war of destruction against the DRV and a war of aggression
against the Vietnamese people as a whole.
Notes
1.
Although my task was to compare certain elements
of the Pentagon Papers with Vietnamese “communist historical sources dealing
with the same period,” I have drawn on my own on-the-spot experiences for
certain aspects which were not covered at the time, for reasons of security, by
North Vietnamese official documents. This applies especially for such matters
as the Lansdale sabotage efforts in the period immediately after the Geneva
Agreements. W.B.
2.
The above and following passages represent the
first reaction from Hanoi to the publication of the Pentagon Papers. They are
from the Introduction to “Les Vrais et les Faux Secrets du Pentagone” (True and
False Pentagon Secrets) published in booklet form by Le Court ier d Vietnam,
Hanoi, 1971.
3.
Crisis Now by James M. Gavin, in collaboration
with Arthur T. Hadley Vintage Books, May 1968, pp. 46-49.
4.
“Binh” and “Hao” are the code names given by
Lansdale in his report for the espionage-sabotage groups sent into the North.
5.
L’Agonie de I’Indochine by General Henri
Navarre, Librairie Plon, Paris, 1956.
6.
“North of the 17th Parallel,” Hanoi, Septtmber
1955.
7.
“Official Gazette” of the Republic of Vietnam,
No. 5, January 28, 1956.
8.
Quoted by the author in This Furtive War, p. 48.
International Publishers, New York, 1963.
9.
ICC Note No. IC/FB/3/2/18, Jan. 7, 1958.
10.
Memorandum of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of
the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, February 1962.
11.
The Furtive War, p. 67, International
Publishers, New York, 1963.
12.
William Jorden, formerly of AP and the New York
Times, turned up as Harriman’s spokesman at the Paris Peace talks in May, 1968.
13.
The Wall Street Journal, on May 24, 1961,
reported that General Trudeau had worked out a plan for “sabotage and
subversion of Eastern Europe and North Vietnam,” which is the source quoted by
the DRV document.
14.
A list of such incidents during 1961-1962, was
published by the DRV in July 1963, but is not in the hands of the author at the
time of writing.
15.
Former head of South Vietnam’s “Special Forces.”
He was executed at the time of the coup against Diem.
16.
Quoted from the same UPI despatch of Febmary 22,
1964.
17.
ISA: Office of International Security Affairs,
Defense Department.
18.
William P. Bundy, then Under Secretary of State
for Asian Affairs.
19.
The timetable references are taken verbatim from
Gravel ed., III:8-13. The “Country Team”
is apparently the top US military, diplomatic, CIA, etc., personnel in Saigon.
20.
DE SOTO was a code name for destroyer patrols
off the coast of North Vietnam, which usually took place within the latter’s
territorial waters, claimed as 12 nautical miles.
21.
This and other quotes are from a “Memorandum
regarding the US war acts against the DRV in the first days of August 1964,”
published by the DRV’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 1964.
22.
The Memorandum cites Renter for this
information.
No comments:
Post a Comment