Shadow Warrior (34 page)

At 20:00 hours, the brothers escaped the palace by way of a secret underground tunnel. They emerged in a wooded park in Cholon and were whisked away to a safe house that Nhu's agents had prepared. Using a telephone line that ran directly to the palace, the brothers negotiated futilely with the plotters. Thinking that Diem and Nhu were still inside, Big Minh ordered a final assault on the building. By dawn, the 5th Division under the command of Colonel Nguyen Van Thieu had killed or captured the last of the Palace Guards.

The next morning—November 2—the brothers sought asylum in a Catholic church in Cholon and notified the coup leaders that they were prepared to accept the offer of safe passage. Minh sent an armored personnel carrier to pick them up. During the ride to headquarters, Nhu and one of the men guarding him, Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, got into a shouting match, insulting each other. The other guard, Major Duong Hieu Nghia, later recalled what happened next: “[Nhung] lunged at Nhu with a bayonet and stabbed him again and again, maybe fifteen or twenty times. Still in a rage, he turned to Diem, took out his revolver, and shot him in the head. Then he looked back at Nhu, who was lying on the floor, twitching. He put a bullet into his head too.” Minh is reported to have told an American confidant some months later, “We had no alternative. They had to be killed.” Diem was too popular with the Catholics and refugees, and Nhu posed a threat through the Can Lao Party and the Special Forces.
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In Washington, the National Security Council met again on the morning of November 2. By that time, Kennedy had been informed of the brothers' deaths; he had blanched and left the room at the news. He could not know that his own date with the assassin was but twenty days away. On his way to the meeting, Colby had stopped off at the Catholic church where Barbara attended Mass every weekday morning at 8:00. He told her of Nhu's and
Diem's deaths and asked that she say a special prayer for the departed. Colby found the mood at the White House sober—even somber. Only Rusk seemed to share Lodge's enthusiasm; the ambassador had cabled that the coup had been “a remarkable performance in all respects.” But Colby recalled that there were no recriminations. The NSC turned to face the cold, hard truth that a group of generals, about whom they knew very little, was now in charge of South Vietnam. By this point, Colby had convinced McCone that Washington could no longer continue to treat Lodge with kid gloves. The Military Revolutionary Council, the temporary ruling body that Big Minh and his colleagues had set up in the wake of the coup, was already asking the CIA station for guidance in setting up a new, permanent government.
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Following the NSC meeting, McCone took Colby by the arm and proceeded to the Oval Office. In his usual direct manner, the DCI requested an immediate audience with the president. The two CIA men were duly ushered in. Colby remembers that Kennedy was stricken but composed. “Mr. President, you remember Mr. Colby,” McCone said. JFK smiled and nodded. “In view of the confusion in Saigon, I would like to send him immediately to Saigon to make contact with the generals there and assess the situation on the basis of his close connections with them and his knowledge of the country. I would also like to be able to say that he is going on your authority.” JFK and Colby knew what McCone was talking about: the imperial Lodge. “Certainly,” Kennedy replied.
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Colby was anxious to make the trip, although he was somewhat apprehensive about how he would be received by the coup leaders, given his well-known intimacy with Diem and Nhu. That evening, the Colbys kept a long-standing dinner engagement with the Noltings and Richardsons. It was probably the only wake held for the House of Ngo, Colby later recalled.
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The CIA was in South Vietnam to gather intelligence and to combat the communist insurgency. Bill Colby saw the first function as primarily a handmaiden to the second. His context, as always, was the Cold War. He may have been “mesmerized” by Nhu, as one of his colleagues claimed, and he considered himself Diem's friend, but personal relationships were a means to an end, and that end was the military defeat of the Viet Cong and the political defeat of the National Liberation Front. Colby clung to Diem and then, at the last moment, to Nhu because he saw no alternative. He considered the Buddhists to be self-serving publicity seekers, mystics,
or both. Perhaps the Ngos had mishandled the Buddhist crisis, but Washington would just have to live with it. A military government was not the answer, especially in Vietnam, where, since time immemorial, soldiers of the central power had been associated in the mind of the peasantry with oppression and exploitation. At least Diem and Nhu had recognized the need for economic development and political action, even if their philosophy was tinged with fascism. It was true that Nhu and Tung were ruthless, but the communists were nothing if not ruthless. What kind of conflict did Harriman and Hilsman think the United States and its ally were involved in? Roosevelt and Churchill had embraced Stalin. How much more compromised could the Western democracies be?

Colby had briefly considered resigning in protest over America's decision to abandon Diem and Nhu, but he quickly rejected the idea. “In the early 1960s,” he wrote, “we had not yet reached that national state of mind that considered any difference from one's own views as based on immorality or arrant stupidity and justifying the most extreme denunciations and rejection of authority.”
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Colby consoled himself with the thought that he was but an instrument to be wielded by the forces of good in the Cold War. But, in truth, neither he nor the Agency saw themselves as passive instruments. Lodge, the Bay of Pigs, and Switchback had emasculated the CIA in South Vietnam, but Colby and his colleagues were hardly resigned.

The chilly reception Colby anticipated from Lodge and the Vietnamese generals did not materialize. The ambassador was effusive in his praise for the Agency, and for Acting CIA Chief of Station David Smith in particular. Lodge had obviously gotten the message that the head of the Far Eastern Division was JFK's personal representative. Then it was time to huddle with the junta. Colby was somewhat taken aback when the members greeted him as an old and wise friend. Tran Van Don joked about having been his landlord. Tran Van Kim recalled their work together on the Mountain Scout program. Even the usually reticent Big Minh came around. They barraged him with questions concerning politics, national security, and the US Constitution. General Ton That Dinh did request the immediate recall of Gil Layton, the head of the CIA's covert operations in Vietnam, who had been the murdered Le Quang Tung's opposite number and close friend.

Colby met twice with Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao, South Vietnam's counterinsurgency/pacification guru, who was also a communist agent. He
also journeyed to Dalat to call on General Nguyen Khanh, who had been the first to advise the CIA that serious planning for a coup was underway. Khanh, who had not been named to the ruling Military Revolutionary Council (MRC), gave a rather pessimistic view of the generals' ability to solve the problems facing South Vietnam. Colby asked about the beginnings of a beard that Khanh was sporting. He would continue to grow it, Khanh said, until he was convinced that the new leaders were on the “right path.”
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Colby was due in Honolulu for the fateful conference with McNamara that would endorse Switchback and OPLAN 34A, so he had to leave after only a few days in Vietnam. Before departing, he prepared a report for Mc-Cone outlining the enormous tasks—political, administrative, and military—facing the generals, all of whom had grown to maturity during the heyday of French colonialism. Though the junta was actively seeking guidance from the US Mission, he said, Lodge was insisting that it remain detached. Many in the Mission regarded Big Minh as a feckless opportunist and the MRC as a Trojan horse for National Liberation Front and French neutralization schemes.
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As the generals isolated themselves within their respective compounds waiting for the future to define itself, the situation in the countryside continued to deteriorate. In an effort to court the Military Revolutionary Council, the National Liberation Front had ordered the Viet Cong to reduce the level of violence, but that was hardly necessary. The fall of the House of Ngo revealed that the South Vietnam government's counterinsurgency/pacification statistics had been a sham. Hamlets and villages listed as secure either had no government presence or were ruled by shadow communist administrations. Strategic Hamlets had either fallen prey to their discontented inhabitants or been overrun by the Viet Cong. Long An Province, barely 40 miles south of Saigon, was a communist hotbed. Because the Strategic Hamlet program was identified with Diem and Nhu, the generals lent it no support whatsoever. Meanwhile, the leadership in Hanoi decided that the time was ripe for it to take a direct hand in the conflict. At the Central Committee's Ninth Plenum, held in December 1963, the Politburo decided to throw regular units of the North Vietnamese Army into the fray in South Vietnam.
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Meanwhile, in Honolulu, Colby argued fruitlessly against Operation Switchback. He objected particularly to McNamara's plans to expand
Project Tiger to include the insertion of more agents in the north, maritime raids along North Vietnam's coast, the establishment of a fake resistance movement, and covert bombing raids by unmarked South Vietnamese planes. When it became clear that the Department of Defense would carry the day, Colby, ever the good soldier, agreed to cooperate in developing OPLAN 34A.

Only days later, Colby and his deputy, Bob Myers, sat in the former's office, listening to radio reports on the assassination of President Kennedy. JFK's vacillation on Vietnam, especially his willingness to let Henry Cabot Lodge call the shots in the last days of the Diem regime, had dismayed Colby. There was also the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation—arguably the White House's responsibility—that had so sullied the reputation of the CIA. But Colby admired JFK's idealism and his activist foreign policy. Had Kennedy lived, Colby wrote in
Lost Victory
, “I am convinced that his sensitivity to the political aspects of the war waged by the Communists would have led him to insist on a strategy on our side to match them.”
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' There certainly would not have been the massive buildup of troops and indiscriminate use of firepower that occurred under the succeeding administration, Colby believed. How Kennedy would have dealt with the almost certain collapse of South Vietnam in 1964—a product of the South Vietnamese government's own weakness and North Vietnamese Army infiltration—was a question Colby left unanswered.

Like most Americans at the time, Colby did not know what to make of Lyndon B. Johnson. He knew that he was a political operator par excellence and had been a Diem supporter. But Colby and many others believed the new president to be inexperienced and uninformed on foreign policy matters. Colby applauded Johnson's dismissal of Roger Hilsman (for his role in the ouster of the Ngo brothers), but he questioned the wisdom of keeping on the rest of JFK's foreign policy team, fearing that Johnson would become the victim rather than the master of events.
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Johnson was in fact in basic agreement with the foreign policies of the Kennedy administration: military preparedness and realistic diplomacy, he believed, would contain communism within its existing bounds. To keep up morale among America's allies and satisfy hardline anticommunists at home, the United States must continue to hold fast in Berlin, oppose the admission of Communist China to the United Nations, and continue to
confront and blockade Cuba. He was aware of the growing split between the Soviet Union and China, and of the possibilities inherent in it for dividing the communist world. He also took a flexible, even hopeful, view of the Soviet Union and its leader, Nikita Khrushchev. It was just possible, he believed, that Russia was becoming a status quo power, and as such would be a force for stability rather than chaos in the world. The United States must continue its “flexible response” of military aid, economic assistance, and technical and political advice in response to the threat of communist expansion in the developing world. However, there was nothing wrong with negotiation with the Soviets, in the meantime, in an effort to reduce tensions. Insofar as Latin America was concerned, Johnson was an enthusiastic supporter of the Alliance for Progress. As a progressive Democrat, he was drawn to historian Arthur Schlesinger's stratagem of appealing to the vital center at home and abroad while pursuing openings to the left, as Bill Colby had done in Italy. At the outset of his administration, it appeared that the new president did not buy into the myth of a monolithic communist threat. To all appearances, then, Johnson was a cold warrior, but a flexible, pragmatic one.

Nevertheless, LBJ was no more ready than his predecessor had been to unilaterally withdraw from South Vietnam; nor was he interested in seeking a negotiated settlement that would lead to neutralization of the area south of the 17th parallel. On November 24, 1963, he instructed Ambassador Lodge to tell the generals who had overthrown Ngo Dinh Diem that they had the full support of the US government. Two days later, the National Security Council incorporated his pledge into policy, affirming that it was “the central objective of the United States” to assist the “people and Government of South Vietnam to win their contest against the externally directed and supported communist conspiracy.”
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Frustrated, and angry with Lodge because of his refusal to allow the Agency to do its job in South Vietnam, McCone and Colby were determined to rein in the ambassador. Shortly after Johnson became president, McCone paid a visit to the Oval Office. There could never be a working relationship between the embassy and the Agency in South Vietnam as long as the New Englander was ambassador, he told Johnson. “Lodge would destroy [the new station chief] if he opposed his assignment or did not like him,” McCone declared. “Lodge was absolutely unconscionable in matters of this kind and he had resorted to trickery time and time again
during the Eisenhower administration. . . . He never failed to use the newspapers in order to expose an individual or block an action.”
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Johnson assured McCone that he understood how poor a manager Lodge was. He had seen that for himself. But it was impossible to recall the man at that point. The junta would take it as a repudiation of the coup and an invitation to the Diemists to return to power. Moreover, replacing Lodge would remove the political cover that the administration had enjoyed over Vietnam. Lodge needed to come home; one could only hope that he would decide to throw his hat in the ring for the 1964 GOP presidential nomination. Nevertheless, McCone and Colby could have their own man as CIA station chief, the president declared, and he would make it work.