Deadly Deceits (23 page)

By late 1963 the People's Revolutionary Party (PRP) and its National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) had declared that in their 30 different organizations they had a membership of 7 million, with the largest front groups being the Farmers' Liberation Association with 1.8 million members and the Women's Liberation Association with 1.2 million. These figures were undoubtedly inflated, but U.S. intelligence estimates ignored their existence. To understand the way U.S. intelligence estimated communist strength in South Vietnam at the time, it is useful to review the following chart, included in the
Pentagon Papers
and prepared by the RAND Corporation:

VIET CONG STRENGTH

1954 – 1964

(rounded to nearest thousand)

*
Estimate of Viet Cong strength for this period is subject to great uncertainty. The numbers here should be treated as order of magnitude.

**
Add approximately 40,000 in the Viet Cong “infrastructure.” The infrastructure is defined as the PRP, PRP Central Committee, and the NLF. See MACV,
Monthly Order of Battle Summaries
, for a discussion. Also add 23-25,000 in Administrative Service, i.e., staff and technical service units subordinate to various headquarters.
²²

The chart uses the term Viet Cong as the intelligence community's rather imprecise name for the Vietnamese communist movement in the South. The figures are based on both Agency and military estimates of the number of communists in the country, but those sourced to NIEs (National Intelligence Estimates), SNIEs (Special National Intelligence Estimates), and the
Current Intelligence Weekly Summary
of OCI (Office of Current Intelligence) most closely reflect the Agency's input.

The chart reveals a total lack of appreciation of the size of the movement. In 1954 French intelligence estimated that the communists controlled up to 90 percent of rural South Vietnam outside of the sect domains.
²³
Yet, until 1964 U.S. intelligence only twice recorded any militia, guerrilla, or other irregular forces. Most glaringly, even after the communists announced the existence of the NLF and its multi-million-person structure, the estimates failed to include a single member of the farmers', the women's, or the youth groups. Until 1964 the chart also omits any reference to Communist Party members—the key element in the revolution. Those omissions reveal a lack of understanding of revolutionary methods and forces.

The Agency's erroneous assessment of the communist movement is best exemplified by a speech Colby gave in Vietnam. In his book,
Honorable Men
, he talks of a briefing he gave to American civilian and military chiefs in Vietnam in 1968: “To that audience I set forth something different from the usual rundown of Communist main- and local-force battalions.… I outlined instead the structure and functions of the Lao Dong Party and its southern section, named the People's Revolutionary Party, the National Liberation Front, the
Provisional Government of South Vietnam, the Liberation Committees and National Alliance of Democratic Forces,
which had made post-Tet
[1968]
appearances
. [Emphasis added.] I pointed out that these had
failed to attract much popular support
[emphasis added] but they nevertheless were the phantom political skeleton that the Communists would use in any negotiation for a peace treaty or cease-fire.”
²⁴

After the war the U.S. government's leading authority on Vietnamese communism, Douglas Pike, tersely commented that earlier estimates by outsiders of the size of the party in the South had been consistently low. The party in the South (excluding the military and front groups) actually numbered at least 350,000 and may have had as many as 500,000 members.
²⁵

Although the CIA consistently underestimated communist strength in rural areas, its expanding and increasingly oppressive programs belied that false optimism. In 1959, William Colby, then chief of Saigon station, convinced Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem's brother, to build self-defense forces in rural villages. This program utilized American Special Forces to form Catholic men and women into what were called Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG). Under this program 30,000 CIDG received arms and developed patrolling strike forces.
²⁶

Diem's police state found its programs unable to control the people. Beginning in 1959, with the assistance of the CIA, it sponsored a program to move villagers into organized communities for self defense. This concept, called “agrovilles,” generated fierce resistance from the South Vietnamese who were forced to leave their homes to settle in the new sites.

Learning little from this experience, Diem's government, with the CIA in the lead, initiated the “strategic hamlet” program in late 1961. South Vietnamese were forcibly moved into fenced and guarded compounds, and the Special Police weeded out any Communists. An ideal strategic hamlet included a watch tower, a moat, fortifications, and barbed wire. The program infuriated the people whose homes were destroyed to force them into those confined sites. The strategic hamlet program died with the assassination of Diem.

The CIA was a most reluctant participant in Diem's removal, but other elements of our government demanded it. After several false starts, the coup group with U.S.
encouragement deposed Diem in early November 1963. Colby called the American-sponsored overthrow of Diem the worst mistake of the war. He said Buddhists had raised an essentially false issue of religious discrimination.
²⁷

Various coup governments took turns ruling South Vietnam following the assassination of Diem. There were six governments in the next 18 months alone.

The Agency continued to develop programs for rural security. First it developed the People's Action Teams—small teams of local armed men who provided security to the rural villages. This program soon expanded under the government of Nguyen Cao Ky, and its name was changed to Revolutionary Development. Ultimately 40,000 cadres were formed into 59-man Revolutionary Development Teams, which were directly funded and administered by the CIA.

The Agency also financed the construction of interrogation centers in all provinces and a National Interrogation Center in Saigon, all under the CIA-backed Central Intelligence Organization.
²⁸

In early 1964 President Johnson's national security advisers decided something was needed to overcome the U.S. public's apathy toward the war. To this purpose an entire series of U.S. provocations occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin. They included a July 31 attack on Hon Me Island by MACV-supported South Vietnamese Special Forces; the August 2 bombardment and strafing of North Vietnamese villages in the vicinity of Hon Me by aircraft, and the repeated feints of attack against Hon Me Island by the U.S. Navy destroyer
Maddox
. The ruse worked and North Vietnamese patrol boats, assuming the
Maddox
to be a part of the earlier South Vietnamese Special Forces attack, fired a few rounds at the destroyer. The next day the
Maddox
returned with a second destroyer and another so-called attack was launched at this two-ship patrol. Congress reacted immediately to what became known as the Tonkin Gulf incident. It passed a joint resolution of support and the American people responded to this “attack” on our sovereignty.
²⁹

However, in a few months U.S. policymakers needed additional evidence to justify the war to foreign and domestic audiences and to sustain the view that the insurgency was an invasion of the South by the North. To this end the State
Department issued a second White Paper. In 1961 it had already published the first one, “A Threat to the Peace: North Viet-Nam's Effort to Conquer South Viet-Nam.” In 1965, just before the entry of U.S. combat troops into Vietnam and before the regular bombing of North Vietnam by American planes, the State Department issued “Aggression from the North: The Record of North Viet-Nam's Campaign to Conquer South Viet-Nam.” Both papers relied on contrived CIA intelligence to support their arguments, and the second paper was based in part on evidence planted by the CIA.
³⁰
The Agency conducted at least two covert operations to prove the paper's thesis. One involved an elaborate scheme to print large numbers of postage stamps showing the Viet Cong shooting down a U.S. helicopter. The highly professional production technique was meant to indicate that the stamp was produced in North Vietnam because the Viet Cong had no such capability. The Agency printed sheets of those stamps, wrote letters in Vietnamese, mailed them all over the world, and made copies available to U.S. journalists. A full-color blow-up of the “North Vietnamese Stamp” appeared on the cover of
Life
magazine on February 26, 1965, just two days before publication of the White Paper.
³¹

The second covert operation entailed planting a weapons shipment and blaming it on the North Vietnamese. The Agency took tons of Communist-made weapons out of its warehouses, loaded them on a Vietnamese coastal vessel, faked a firefight, and then called in Western reporters and International Control Commission observers to “prove” North Vietnamese aid to the Viet Cong. The White Paper featured details of this operation under the headline, “Hanoi Supplies Weapons, Ammunition and Other War Material to Its Forces in the South.” Seven pages of the White Paper were devoted to the CIA-planted evidence, including photographs of the beached Vietnamese junk and the assortment of ammunition it carried.
³²
On March 6, 1965, just a week after the issuance of the White Paper, President Johnson ordered two Marine Corps battalion landing teams into Vietnam and the initiation of Operation Rolling Thunder, which consisted of the systematic bombing of North Vietnam.

U.S. combat troops in South Vietnam quickly discovered that the rural South Vietnamese, who were fighting for and
supporting the Viet Cong, considered them the enemy. Nonetheless, the United States developed a simple plan to win—force the peasants by the millions into the cities and towns, turn the entire country into a massive police compound, and you deny those millions to the communists. Search-and-destroy missions, free-fire zones, and bombing of rural South Vietnam were all conducted to force the peasants out of their villages into the cities.

General Westmoreland put it this way: “So closely entwined were some populated localities with the tentacles of the VC base areas … that the only way to establish control short of constant combat operations among the people was to remove the people.”
³³

The CIA created a program of hunter-killer teams. According to Marchetti and Marks, “In 1965 Colby … oversaw the founding in Vietnam of the Agency's Counter Terror (CT) program. In 1966 the Agency became wary of adverse publicity surrounding the use of the word ‘terror' and changed the name of the CT teams to the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs).…[The operation was described as] ‘a unilateral American program, never recognized by the South Vietnamese government. CIA representatives recruited, organized, supplied, and directly paid CT teams, whose function was to use … techniques of terror—assassination, abuses, kidnappings and intimidation—against the Viet Cong leadership.'”
³⁴

All of the various civilian, military, and police programs were to contribute to the CORDS structure and programs. The primary CORDS program was the Phoenix operation. Under Phoenix, devised by Colby's office, all units coordinated “an attack against the Vietcong infrastructure.… Again CIA money was the catalyst. According to Colby's own testimony in 1971 before a congressional committee, 20,587 suspected Vietcong were killed under Phoenix in its first two and a half years. Figures provided by the South Vietnamese government credit Phoenix with 40,994 VC kills.”
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