A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (61 page)

The family temporarily stopped beating reporters and switched to the more sinister tactic of threatening assassination. With the Ngo Dinhs, especially Nhu and his wife, one could never be certain whether they were bluffing in a war of nerves or meant to carry out the threat. When Madame Nhu told an English correspondent, “Halberstam should be
barbecued, and I would be glad to supply the fluid and the match,” one could know that her wish, at least, was genuine.

Our first tip came from the police. The disaffection that had spread through most of the bureaucracy had also touched them. They would still execute orders from the palace to keep their jobs, but many were fearful of the future and, despite their acquaintanceship with moral filth, guilt-ridden. At a demonstration one day in late July a plainclothesman walked up to the Vietnamese television cameraman who worked for me, taking film for UPI Movietone News. “Tell your boss to be careful when he goes out at night,” he said. “We may get orders to kill him and make it look like the VC did it.”

By this time Nguyen Ngoc Rao, the Vietnamese reporter in the UPI bureau, had developed excellent police sources. They told him that the Nhus had drawn up an assassination list. It included a number of reporters and senior ARVN officers and civilian Vietnamese intelligence officials who were considered disloyal and potential coup plotters. The Nhus were serious, the police said, and they might soon be instructed to carry out the killings. Halberstam and I were on the list. As they had nothing against us personally, the police officials advised Rao to warn us to take precautions. A couple of CIA sources passed along the same information, saying that several of their people were also on the list because the Nhus suspected them of fomenting plots.

Halberstam and I were still reluctant to accept the threat as genuine, because we were already living with so much tension, when one of the Vietnamese intelligence officers on the list (he was ostensibly the regime’s deputy director general of information) confirmed it for us. He was a bachelor and a womanizer who frequented a nightclub that was a hangout for some of Saigon’s gangsters. They said they had been hired by the Nhus to conduct possible assassinations and that he was one of their potential targets. Would he please be careful, the gangsters said. He was a friend and they would not like to have to kill him.

The White House announced in July that Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., would replace Frederick Nolting as ambassador at the end of the summer. By the time Nolting departed in mid-August, the broadcasts of “Radio Catinat”—as Saigon’s rumor mill was called for the gossip gatherings in the coffee shops and cafés of the main street—said that the arrival of Lodge meant an end to the U.S. policy of supporting the Ngo Dinhs. “I do not think that Mr. Cabolodge will be President Diem’s cup of tea,” the witty monk who was the press spokesman for the Buddhist
leadership said to Halberstam in his best pronunciation of Lodge’s name. On Sunday, August 18, the Buddhists displayed their mounting strength as if to impress the soon-to-arrive Lodge through the news reports. They assembled about 15,000 people at the main Xa Loi Pagoda, one of the largest and most enthusiastic crowds they had ever summoned, for hours of speeches by the monks denouncing the regime for its tyranny and its outrages against Vietnamese Buddhism. Prayers alternated with the speeches, and occasionally the monks broke the tension with a favorite intermission—a scurrilous joke about Madame Nhu. This time the palace did not order the police to intervene, despite the provocation, and the demonstration ended peacefully.

The restraint was ominous. Two nights later, half an hour after midnight on the 20th, Diem and Nhu took a brutal gamble to end the Buddhist crisis in a stroke and force the Kennedy administration and “Mr. Cabolodge” to drink their cup of tea. Thousands of police and ARVN Special Forces troops simultaneously assaulted the pagodas in Saigon, Hue, and the other cities and towns where the Buddhists were strongest. Thanks to Mert Perry’s ability to understand French, Halberstam and I reached the main Xa Loi Pagoda with the raiders. Perry and his wife, Darlene, lived in the apartment just above mine, and we shared the same phone number. (Telephones were scarce in Saigon in 1963.) An anonymous tipster, probably a police or intelligence officer, called shortly before midnight. Perry had just undressed for bed. The caller asked for me. Perry said that I was not there. (I had dropped off Halberstam after checking the pagodas with him and was on my way back in one of the city’s little rattletrap Renault taxis.) “Tell him they will arrest all of the monks right after midnight,” the tipster said in French.

Perry shouted the message down to me as I was climbing out of the taxi a moment later. I jumped back inside and yelled at the driver to race for Halberstam’s house. He had no phone at home. There was a police precinct headquarters a couple of blocks before his house. When the taxi passed it I could see that the floodlit compound was filled with the U.S. Army model two-and-a-half-ton trucks the military aid program provided and that soldiers in battle gear and police were climbing into them. We met the raiding convoy a few minutes later as the trucks were pulling out of the compound and starting for Xa Loi and the taxi, with Halberstam now inside, came hurtling back in the same direction. By gesturing to the driver and shouting at him in a mixture of French and pidgin Vietnamese, Halberstam and I browbeat him into slipping the tiny Renault between the second and third trucks in the convoy. He
was understandably terrified. We assumed that the police at the tail end of the convoy would block the street as soon as the trucks reached the pagoda.

The raid on Xa Loi, like those on the pagodas elsewhere in South Vietnam, was flawlessly executed. It reminded me of a scene from a movie of the French Resistance—the scene when the Gestapo arrive at the Resistance hideout in Paris. As the drivers of the trucks in our convoy slammed to a stop beside the pagoda compound, two more convoys converged on the place from opposite directions. The police and troops in the trucks vaulted to the pavement, and the officers shouted orders and formed up their units. The gong at the top of the pagoda started to clang an alarm into the night. The monks added to this din of helplessness by beating on pots and pans. The police battered open the pagoda gate and then squads of ARVN Special Forces troops, in trim camouflage fatigues and berets, with submachine guns held high, pranced up before the gate to lead the assault.

The ARVN Special Forces were another creation of the CIA that the Ngo Dinhs had turned to their private purpose. The CIA had trained and armed this elite unit for commando operations against the guerrillas and for forays into Laos and the North. The Ngo Dinhs had always had another goal in mind, which explained why the ARVN Special Forces had been held back and never employed effectively against the Viet Cong. The family had hoodwinked the CIA into forming a Praetorian Guard for them. They had made certain that the Special Forces troops were recruited mainly from Central and North Vietnamese Catholic families and had put them under command of a man they trusted absolutely, Lt. Col. Le QuangTung, another Central Vietnamese Catholic.

There was enough illumination from the streetlamps and the headlights of the trucks for Halberstam and me to see the shoulder patches of the troops from the convoys as they assembled. None of them were regular ARVN soldiers or paratroopers. They were all Tung’s men. Diem and Nhu did not trust the regular army for this internal cleansing. For this work they were using their household troops. Colonel Tung was literally a man of their household. He had been a family servant of the Ngo Dinhs before becoming a noncom in the French Expeditionary Corps. Diem had given him his officer’s commission. The rest of the raiders were the Combat Police the CIA had also created, in their own distinctive camouflage uniforms, and the French holdovers—the ordinary, white-uniformed National Police.

An officer shouted a command, and the first of the prancing squads charged through the pagoda gate, followed by more Special Forces
troops and police. The crash of breaking glass began, and the splintering of doors giving way to boot heels and the butts of submachine guns. Shots interspersed with the screams of the monks being dragged from their rooms, and there were bursts of automatic-weapons fire from other Special Forces troops stationed behind the pagoda who were shooting BARs to stop any of the monks from escaping over the rear wall. Trucks with canopies of dark green canvas erected over the beds to conceal the cargo backed up to the gate. The police hurled figures in orange robes inside. When one truck was filled and pulled away for Saigon’s Chi Hoa Prison, another backed up in its place.

The drama went on for two hours, because some of the monks barricaded themselves in their rooms with stacks of furniture. Two monks managed to escape over the rear wall despite the bullets from the BARs and took shelter in a U.S.-owned building right next to the pagoda. It was the four-story Saigon headquarters of AID. The most militant of the Buddhist leaders, Thich Tri Quang (Thich is the Vietnamese honorific for a monk), who had organized the first protest meeting in Hue and who knew that he was marked for death, stole out of the pagoda just before the raid with two fellow monks and went into hiding. Approximately 1, 400 monks and nuns at Xa Loi and other pagodas in South Vietnam were arrested that night, including some lay followers who had gone to the pagodas as an act of faith. Thirty of the monks at Xa Loi were wounded, and seven were never heard from again. They were apparently killed and their bodies disposed of secretly. The raids were bloodiest in Hue. About thirty monks and student followers were shot or clubbed to death there, and the great statue of Buddha in Hue’s main Tu Dam Pagoda was smashed.

Diem declared martial law. He put Saigon under Brig. Gen. Ton That Dinh, a boisterous ex-French paratrooper, given to Scotch and loyal to the Ngo Dinhs. A 9:00
P.M.
curfew was imposed. The troops and police had orders to shoot to kill anyone on the streets after curfew who did not have a pass and tried to flee arrest. Under the cover of night and curfew the police ransacked houses and apartments and rounded up more suspected opponents of the regime. Fear was as tangible in Saigon as touching one’s skin. The dissident intelligence officer who had passed on the warning from his gangster acquaintances—and who was involved in an abortive coup plot and had arranged for Halberstam to witness the coup from its command post if the plot went forward—fled for his life. A lycée classmate who owned several freighters shipped him to Yokohama with a load of fertilizer.

Halberstam and I no longer dared to sleep at home. We slept every
night for the next three weeks at the house of John Mecklin, the USIS chief, who was kind enough to give us shelter. I took Nguyen Ngoc Rao to Mecklin’s house with me. He had courageously refused to quit and hide, despite pleas from his family. While Mecklin’s house did not have diplomatic immunity, it was U.S. property, and we assumed that at night we were safer there from arrest or worse. Tran Van Chuong, Madame Nhu’s father and the regime’s ambassador in Washington, resigned, announcing that now there was “not one chance in a hundred for victory” over the Communists with his daughter and her husband and brother-in-law in power. Her mother, Saigon’s official observer at the UN, resigned with him, as did most of the embassy staff.

The press spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, who never had anything to announce, telephoned in hysteria. The foreign minister, a meek man named Vu Van Mau, had also resigned, shaved his head like a monk, and asked Diem for permission to go on a pilgrimage to India. Diem gave consent. The press and the diplomatic corps assembled at Tan Son Nhut to see him off. He never arrived. Nhu had General Dinh arrest Mau on his way to the airport. Another general persuaded Dinh to put the former foreign minister under house arrest, not in a cell, and to let him keep his passport. “Tomorrow you may be given the order to have me arrested,” the other general said to Dinh. “Be good to me, eh? Get me a nice cell and put a pretty girl in it.”

The Saigon University students rioted. Hundreds were beaten and arrested. Diem closed the university. (He had already closed the South’s other university at Hue because of demonstrations there.) The high school students then rioted. The schools that rioted first were the best Vietnamese high schools, many of the students the sons and daughters of civil servants and military officers.

At Trung Vuong, a famous girls’ school, the police were met in the yard by long lines of young ladies, dressed in the pale blue
ao dai
that was their school uniform, holding hands and chanting in high-pitched voices:
“Da Dao
Ngo Dinh Diem!” (Down with Ngo Dinh Diem!),
“Da Dao
Ngo Dinh Nhu!”
“Da Dao
Tran Le Xuan!” (Madame Nhu in the insulting form of her maiden name). The boys were violent. They smashed the windows with their desks and chairs and hung banners on the outside walls that were more explicit in their insults to Madame Nhu.

The Ngo Dinhs proceeded to arrest the children of the people who ran the country for them. One morning the trucks hauled more than 1,000 high school students off to jail. As the police burst into the schoolyards, jeeps and staff cars would pull up and officers would dash in and
try to rescue their children. This prolonged suicide of the dynasty that Lansdale had founded became a theater of the bizarre. At a high school one morning a plainclothesman was pushing a boy toward a van and kicking him hard. A senior police officer in uniform went manic at the sight. He grabbed the plainclothesman and beat him wildly with a truncheon. Diem closed the high schools too.

General Dinh boasted in French to Lou Conein, his old CIA acquaintance from earlier years: “I, Dinh, am a great national hero. I have defeated the American, Cabot Lodge. He was on his way here to pull a coup d’état, but I, Dinh the hero, have foiled him.”

He arrived at Tan Son Nhut in a drizzling rain two nights after the raids on the pagodas. He looked a bit old-fashioned when the door of the plane opened and he emerged into the glare of the television spotlights with a straw hat in his hand. As he walked down the steps of the gangway, one saw that he was too long of limb at nearly six feet three inches to be called lanky. He was, rather, the lean and angular man that popular legend said New England Yankees were supposed to be. His profile was cut precisely, the jaw pronounced, the nose large and slightly hooked. Sixty-one years had rounded his shoulders, brought his neck and head forward, and grayed his hair. Otherwise one could still recognize the man in the photographs of his prime—the freshman senator from Massachusetts in 1936, the one Republican star in Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide against Alfred Landon; the Army lieutenant colonel on the Western Front in World War II; a leading Republican senator of the postwar era, the national political strategist who had persuaded Eisenhower to run for president and had been Ike’s campaign manager in 1952; Eisenhower’s ambassador to the United Nations when the post had truly been second in rank and prestige to that of the secretary of state; the man Eisenhower had trusted to escort Nikita Khrushchev on his historic tour of the United States in 1959; and then what had seemed an unsatisfactory end to his public life, Nixon’s running mate in the 1960 election against Kennedy.