Ngo Dinh Diem

Ngo Dinh Diem (died November 2, 1963, Saigon) was premier of the State of Vietnam from July 7, 1954, and president of South Vietnam until he and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were killed during the generals' coup of November 1 and 2, 1963.¹² Two Central Intelligence Agency stations in Saigon worked with his government from its first weeks, and the CIA paid money through him to armed sects in 1954.³⁴ A Michigan State University group under contract to his government advised his police from 1955 to 1962.⁵ The Senate's Church Committee found in 1975 that the United States encouraged the coup against him but neither desired nor was involved in his death.²

Early career

Diem was an Annamese Catholic who had been governor of Phan Thiet province and then minister of the interior at the imperial court of Bao Dai in Hue. In 1933, after a year in the latter office, he found that reforms he had been promised were blocked by French and Annamese officials, resigned and went into political retirement.¹ He had earlier served as district and province chief in Annam.⁶ Bao Dai sought him as premier in 1945, Ho Chi Minh sought him for the government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1946, and the French for their solutions in 1947 and 1949, all without success.¹ His brother Ngo Dinh Thuc was a leading Catholic clergyman with connections throughout the country and later the ranking Catholic bishop; Nhu built the semi-covert Can Lao party, and another brother, Ngo Dinh Can, built a personal political organization of his own.¹

American patrons, 1950 to 1954

Wesley Fishel, a political scientist about to join Michigan State University, met Diem in a tea room in Tokyo in July 1950, according to Ramparts.⁵⁷ The magazine reported that Fishel had Diem appointed a consultant to the university's Governmental Research Bureau and helped arrange his long stay in the United States, and that Diem in 1952 asked the French to let Michigan State furnish technical aid to Vietnam at American expense.⁵ Diem lived with the Maryknoll missionaries in New Jersey and New York between 1951 and 1953, which gave him the competence in English that made him accessible to American officials; a State Department officer who met him in late 1950 reported that he believed "only [the] US can solve [the] problem, thru him to be sure," and an American military officer who met him in 1953 left with the impression of a "mystic 'nut.'"⁶ His supporters in this period included Cardinal Francis Spellman, Senators Mike Mansfield, John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, and Congressman Walter Judd.⁶ Robert Scheer and Warren Hinckle wrote in Ramparts in July 1965 that Justice William O. Douglas arranged a breakfast at which Diem met Mansfield and Kennedy.⁷

Scheer and Hinckle wrote that Leo Cherne, president of the International Rescue Committee, spent two and a half weeks in Vietnam in 1954 and sent his assistant Joseph Buttinger, a former leader of the Austrian Socialists, to set up a committee operation there. Buttinger met Diem four days after arriving, at the request of Colonel Edward Lansdale, whom they describe as "the CIA's man in Saigon," and Lansdale introduced him to the security officials of Diem's government and to the army. They wrote that Lansdale "went through channels," convincing CIA Director Allen Dulles of Diem's worth; that Dulles talked to his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who brought the word to Eisenhower; that on Buttinger's return in December 1954 Spellman telephoned Joseph P. Kennedy, who arranged meetings for Buttinger with Mansfield and State Department officials; that Buttinger talked with Senator Kennedy's assistant Ted Sorensen; and that Spellman set up meetings with the editors of The New York Times, the Herald Tribune, Time and Life. They called the effort the work of "a small and enthusiastic group of people, including a Cardinal, an ex-Austrian Socialist leader, and a CIA agent."⁷ The authors of the Pentagon Papers recorded that "there are those who believe that Diem was foisted upon the Vietnamese and the French by a cabal of prominent American Catholics and a CIA agent."¹

The two CIA stations, 1954 to 1955

By the time Diem took office the CIA had two independent stations in Saigon: the regular station under Emmett McCarthy, whose covert action chief Paul Harwood had arrived in April 1954 to assess nationalist politicians, and the Saigon Military Mission under Lansdale.³⁴ Harwood had known Nhu for several months, and Nhu became the regular station's principal contact in the government. Lansdale recalled in his memoirs that he walked in on Diem unannounced the day after Diem took office, and the two communicated through an interpreter for two and a half years. The Embassy, oriented toward the French, kept the brothers at a distance, and Lansdale and Harwood became the principal channels of political information and influence between the two governments.³⁴

Nhu, after asking for CIA support without "controls," obtained the station's agreement to plan projects that included the Can Lao party, to be developed from his semi-covert Workers' Party as a cadre organization controlling a mass front.⁴ Nhu told Harwood that the outgoing premier, Prince Buu Loc, had absconded with the premier's confidential fund. In the first weeks of the government Harwood sent piasters to the Palace for Diem's discretionary use; Harwood later could not recall the amount, which was written off on a hand receipt from a Palace functionary. From about August 1954 the station let Nhu use part of its subsidy to support a hamlet militia that Nhu said numbered some 15,000 men by the end of the year.⁴ In September 1954 Diem asked Lansdale for funds to buy the support of the Cao Dai commander Trinh Minh The, whom the French believed had assassinated their commanding general in the south in 1950. Lansdale delivered the money in dollars to Diem, who passed it through Nhu to The, and on September 15 Lansdale was received at The's headquarters on the Cao Dai mountain in Tay Ninh. Lansdale's official report states only that "at Ambassador Heath's request, the US secretly furnished Diem with funds for The."⁴ The intelligence section of the Can Lao, the Political and Social Studies Service known as SEPES and headed by Dr. Tran Kim Tuyen, became with CIA help the government's service for collection against North Vietnam.⁴

Premier, 1954 to 1955

Diem took office on July 7, 1954, and until the following May stood virtually alone, unaided by Bao Dai, opposed by the French and offered by Americans mainly advice, criticism and promises. In ten months he survived the partition at Geneva, two threatened coups by his army chiefs of staff, clashes with the Binh Xuyen and the armed sects, and the arrival of some 900,000 refugees from the north.¹ On December 7, 1954, Senator Mansfield judged that prospects for helping Diem looked "very dim," and in January 1955 General J. Lawton Collins, the President's special representative, agreed in a report to the National Security Council. Collins cabled on April 7, 1955, that "the man lacks the personal qualities of leadership and the executive ability successfully to head a government," and on April 19, "I see no alternative to the early replacement of Diem."¹

The Binh Xuyen was the organization of Bay Vien, who, in Lansdale's words, had paid Bao Dai "a staggering sum" for control of gambling and prostitution in Cholon and of the Saigon-Cholon police.¹ After Diem survived a test of arms with the army and the sects in late April 1955, Senators Mansfield and William Knowland issued statements of support and, on May 2, Senator Humphrey told the Senate that Diem was "the best hope that we have in South Vietnam." In May 1955 the Joint Chiefs judged that his government "shows the greatest promise of achieving the internal stability essential for the future security of Vietnam."¹ Diem returned in late August 1955 money the CIA had advanced for a scheme that came to nothing, and used Lansdale as an intermediary in unproductive negotiations with the Hoa Hao commander Ba Cut until shortly before Ba Cut's capture in April 1956.⁴

The Popular Revolutionary Committee that Nhu had formed at the height of the sect crisis, whose members included two former Viet Minh leaders, urged the dissolution of the Bao Dai government and elections for a national assembly. Acting under its mandate, Nhu set up a referendum in which, on October 23, 1955, an overwhelming vote for Diem over Bao Dai was recorded. The committee dissolved itself on October 31, apparently under pressure from Diem and his brother.¹ In 1955 and 1956, in the words of the Defense Department study, Lansdale "was a key figure in installing and establishing Diem as President of South Vietnam."⁸

The Michigan State University group, 1955 to 1962

Ramparts reported in April 1966, in "MSU: The University on the Make," that the Michigan State University Group in Vietnam, an official university project under contract to Saigon and Washington, had responsibility for Diem's civil service and police network, the shaping of a 50,000-man militia and the supply of guns and ammunition to the city police, the Civil Guard, the palace police and the Sûreté. The magazine put the cost at $25 million, the largest project ever undertaken abroad by an American university. It reported that after a telephone call from Washington to the university's president, John A. Hannah, requesting that red tape be cut, the first professors joined Fishel in Saigon in late May 1955; Fishel once indicated that the call came from Vice President Richard Nixon, later denied it, and Hannah told the Detroit News that it came from an authority "even higher than Nixon." Fishel became chief of the group in 1956.⁵

In an introduction to the article, the economist Stanley K. Sheinbaum, campus coordinator of the project for three years, wrote that "our Project had become a CIA front." Sheinbaum and Robert Scigliano, assistant chief of the project from 1957 to 1959, told the magazine that five CIA men were listed on the project staff, formally appointed by the university's board of trustees, in several cases given academic rank and paid by the project, as a self-contained "VBI Internal Security Section" within the police administration division, assigned to counterespionage and counterintelligence. The magazine quoted a book by Scigliano and Guy H. Fox, Technical Assistance in Vietnam: The Michigan State University Experience (Praeger, 1965): "USOM also absorbed at this time [1959] the CIA unit that had been operating within MSUG."⁵ The project, according to Ramparts, requisitioned revolvers, riot guns, ammunition, tear gas, jeeps, handcuffs and radios from stocks left over from American aid to the French, ordered some $15 million in further equipment from the United States Mission, and trained the Palace Guard in revolver shooting; the dean of the university's police administration school, Arthur Brandstatter, personally inspected the Palace Guard when rumors of a coup were circulating.⁵

Hannah answered at a news conference on April 22, 1966, that Michigan State "did not have a spy operation within its Vietnam project" and did not have CIA people operating under cover provided by the university. He said the university had hired several men with a background in intelligence work, none known at the time of employment to have CIA affiliations; that some staff later became suspicious that some were CIA men; that the university asked the American and Vietnamese governments to let it out of the counter-subversive program and reduced its police administration division to eight persons, including five from its own faculty; that it did not buy "a single gun"; and that the article contained "no fewer than 53 errors of fact." Hinckle dared him to test the charges in court, and Fishel asked the American Civil Liberties Union for help.⁹ A CIA briefing paper of 1967 on the magazine, which lists Scheer as an author of the April 1966 article, records the magazine's financing by its owner, identified only as Mr. Keating, and his wife and describes it as designed to appeal to "campus radicals."¹⁰ The public administration division of the Michigan State group conceived the Civil Guard as a rural constabulary, while Diem wanted a more military force; with the support of the American military advisory group, Diem's view prevailed.¹¹

The project ended in 1962. Ramparts reported that Diem, angered by critical writing published by two of its veterans, would not renew the contract, and that the university announced its termination in the name of academic freedom.⁵

The American Friends of Vietnam and the 1957 visit

Scheer and Hinckle wrote that the "Vietnam Lobby" took formal shape in the fall of 1955 as the American Friends of Vietnam, with Generals "Wild Bill" Donovan and "Iron Mike" O'Daniel as co-chairmen and a letterhead that included Senators Kennedy and Richard Neuberger, Max Lerner, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Representatives Emanuel Celler and Edna Kelly, and Angier Biddle Duke. They wrote that nine of the fourteen directors of the Friends were members of the board of the International Rescue Committee or its employees, including Cherne and Buttinger, and that two months before the Friends were announced the public relations firm of Harold Oram, public relations man for the Rescue Committee, signed a contract to represent the Vietnamese government for $3,000 a month plus expenses, which lasted until 1961. According to the article, Oram and his account executive Gilbert Jonas, both officers of the Friends, were registered as foreign agents of the Republic of Vietnam during the period in which they held executive positions with the organization.⁷

On Diem's official visit to the United States in May 1957 he landed in President Eisenhower's plane, addressed a joint session of Congress, and received the Admiral Richard E. Byrd Award from Duke at a dinner sponsored by the International Rescue Committee and the American Friends of Vietnam. Scheer and Hinckle wrote that many of his speeches were written by Buttinger and by Sol Sanders, a director of the Friends and a writer for The New Leader, and that Sanders resigned from the Friends in 1963 when its executive committee sent a congratulatory telegram to the generals who had deposed and killed Diem.⁷ A State Department set of position papers prepared for the visit was forwarded to the Director of Central Intelligence through the CIA's deputy director for plans on May 9, 1957.¹²

1960 and 1961

On November 11, 1960, paratroop units attacked the palace. The CIA had no advance warning, but its officer George Carver, who had recently recontacted the Dai Viet politician Hoang Co Thuy, was invited that morning to meet Thuy's group of civilians who hoped the military would install them, and with the permission of the chief of station, William Colby, served as the channel of American pressure on the rebels to negotiate rather than storm the palace. Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow took over Colby's desk to listen to the station officers' reports. Diem used the negotiations to gain time until loyal units arrived on November 12.⁴ Lansdale reported after a visit in January 1961 that the Diem government believed Durbrow had "sympathized strongly with the coup leaders of 11 November," and wrote: "We must support Ngo Dinh Diem until another strong executive can replace him legally."⁸

In October 1961 President Kennedy sent General Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow to Vietnam. The mission arrived in Saigon on October 18 as Diem proclaimed a state of emergency, and Taylor cabled Kennedy that the United States had to "convince Diem that we are willing to join him in a showdown with the Viet Cong."⁸

The crisis of 1963

On May 8, 1963, South Vietnamese troops in Hue fired on Buddhists celebrating Buddha's birthday, killing nine and wounding fourteen. By July 4 Generals Duong Van Minh, Tran Van Don, Le Van Kim and Tran Thien Khiem had agreed on the necessity of a coup. Shortly after midnight on August 21 Nhu ordered forces loyal to him to attack pagodas across the country; over thirty monks were injured and 1,400 arrested.²

On August 24 the State Department sent telegram 243 to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. It stated that the "US Government cannot tolerate situation in which power lies in Nhu's hands," authorized Lodge to tell key military leaders that the United States would find it impossible to continue support unless the Nhus were removed, added that "if, in spite of all of your efforts, Diem remains obdurate and refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved," and instructed the country team to "make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem's replacement if this should become necessary." It was drafted by Roger Hilsman, cleared by Hilsman, Michael Forrestal and George Ball, and approved for transmission by Averell Harriman.¹³ Taylor later said it was sent without the concurrence of the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs or the CIA; Hilsman maintained that the President and representatives of the agencies concerned had cleared it.¹³

Lieutenant Colonel Lucien Conein and another CIA officer were told on August 26 to convey the substance of the telegram to Generals Khiem and Nguyen Khanh, reminding them that "we cannot be of any help during initial action of assuming power of state." On August 29 a message from the White House authorized General Paul Harkins to confirm that the United States would support a coup with a good chance of success, and Kennedy cabled Lodge the same day: "Until the very moment of the go signal for the operation by the Generals, I must reserve a contingent right to change course and reverse previous instructions."² On August 30 Taylor sent the President a CIA-sourced table of the probable loyalties of the units around Saigon in a coup, rating the Presidential Guard most likely to remain loyal and the airborne brigade likely to act against Diem.¹⁴

On October 2 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Taylor reported that there was "no solid evidence of the possibility of a successful coup, although assassination of Diem or Nhu is always a possibility." They recommended withholding commodity import funds, which together with Public Law 480 made up 60 to 70 percent of Vietnam's imports, suspending two AID loans, and cutting off MAP and CIA support to the units of Colonel Le Quang Tung unless they were placed under the Joint General Staff. They held that "no initiative should be taken to encourage actively a change in government" and called for "an intensive clandestine effort, under the Ambassador's direction, to establish necessary contacts" to appraise coup prospects.¹⁵ Taylor had written to Diem the day before as "an old friend of South Vietnam," and had met Minh privately on September 29 and October 1.¹⁶¹⁷

The generals and Conein, October 1963

On the night of October 2 Conein, who had known many of the generals since the Second World War, met Don at Nha Trang with the approval of the deputy chief of mission, William Trueheart, whose guidance was to neither encourage nor discourage coup thinking.¹⁸ On October 5 Minh told Conein that he needed to know the American position and outlined three plans, the first being the assassination of Nhu and Ngo Dinh Can with Diem kept in office, which he called the easiest; Conein said he could not answer.¹⁹ The station recommended to Lodge that "we do not set ourselves irrevocably against the assassination plot." John McCone, the Director of Central Intelligence, cabled on October 5 that "we cannot be in the position of stimulating, approving, or supporting assassination," and on October 6 that the recommendation be withdrawn; William Colby, then chief of the Far East Division, drafted the first cable. Conein testified that Lodge told him of McCone's position around October 20 and that he then told Don the United States opposed assassination.² A CIA cable to Lodge of October 9 stated that Washington did not wish to stimulate a coup but would not thwart a change of government or deny aid to a new regime, and that knowledge was confined to an extremely limited group in the White House, State, Defense and the CIA.²⁰

Conein's after-action report of November 1 states that the majority of officers wished Diem to have honorable retirement and exile, but that "as to Ngo Dinh Nhu and Ngo Dinh Can, there was never dissention. The attitude was that their deaths, along with Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu would be welcomed."² Conein received 3 million piasters on October 24 and kept them in a safe at his house; on October 29 Lodge cabled that a request for funds should be anticipated.² The station's cable 2023 of October 29 on Conein's meeting with Don the day before, held at a dentist's office, which listed coup units and described two escape tunnels from Gia Long Palace, was sent eyes only to McNamara, Gilpatric, Taylor, Krulak and William Bundy at Defense, among others.⁴²¹

At the White House on October 29 Colby estimated pro-Diem and anti-Diem forces at about 9,800 each, with 18,000 neutral. Secretary of State Dean Rusk said that the United States needed 48 hours' notice, not four, of any coup. Attorney General Robert Kennedy called his opposition to a coup "the minority view," and Taylor and McCone agreed with him; McNamara proposed that the deputy chief of mission, the acting CIA chief and Harkins jointly decide "what our agent Conein would say and do."²² Around October 30 Colby wrote to McCone proposing that Nhu be installed in his brother's place as a "strong, reasonably well oriented and efficient potential successor," whose "highly unfavorable public image" the United States should help improve; the proposal drew no support.⁴ Conein later recalled that Lodge had remarked that if nothing happened and Lodge made his scheduled trip to Washington, Conein would never work another day for the government.⁴

November 1 and 2, 1963

On the morning of November 1 Diem received Lodge and Admiral Harry Felt and complained that that junior CIA officers were "poisoning atmosphere by spreading rumors of coups against him," naming one officer, Hodges.²³ Speaking alone with Lodge afterwards, Diem asked him to consult "Mr. Colby of CIA and former Ambassador Nolting" about Nhu, saying that Colby had told him it was "too bad that brother Nhu was living in an ivory tower," and asked Lodge to tell Kennedy that he was "a good and a frank ally."²⁴

The coup began early in the afternoon; Harkins cabled Taylor that instead of four hours' or two days' notice "we got approximately four minutes."²⁵ An aide to Don asked Conein to bring all available money to the Joint General Staff headquarters, and Conein brought 3 million piasters, about $42,000, which was given to Don to buy food for the troops and pay death benefits. Don wrote in his memoir, Our Endless War, that Conein "offered us money and weapons, but I turned him down."²²¹ Conein stayed at the Joint General Staff headquarters through the coup, relaying what Minh and Don told him; CIA officers in the streets supplied, with him, nearly all the authoritative information Washington received over the next twenty-four hours.⁴ At 4:30 p.m. Diem telephoned Lodge and asked, "What is the attitude of the US?" Lodge replied that he lacked information and instructions, said he was concerned for Diem's safety, and asked whether Diem had heard of the offer of safe conduct if he resigned; Diem answered, "I am trying to reestablish order."⁴

In Washington, before the outcome was known, Rusk cabled Lodge that "since coup is wholly Vietnamese," premature American recognition would falsely brand it as American-inspired. A second telegram, drafted by Hilsman and McGeorge Bundy, instructed Lodge that acceptance of the coup in the United States would be "greatly increased" if the generals continued to develop "strongly and publicly" their charge that Nhu had been "dickering with Communists"; Lodge replied the next day that he knew "of no hard evidence of such a desire."²⁶²⁷ Rusk told Senator J. William Fulbright by telephone at noon that "our own involvement is minimal."²⁸

At 6:20 on the morning of November 2 Diem called Don and offered to surrender if he and Nhu were given safe conduct to an airport. Lodge had cabled on October 30 that key leaders might request evacuation, and Conein was charged with obtaining an aircraft; when Minh and Don asked for one, a station officer told Conein it would take twenty-four hours, because it would have to come from Guam and could fly Diem only to a country that granted asylum.² The station officer, David Smith, also named France as the country most likely to grant asylum and put at twenty-four hours the time needed to bring in an aircraft able to reach Paris without intermediate stops.⁴ An escort appeared at the palace at 8:00 a.m., but Diem and Nhu were not there.²

When Conein returned to the Joint General Staff about 10:30 a.m., Minh told him the brothers were dead and had killed themselves in a Catholic church, to which Conein responded that someone had better construct a more plausible story. Minh offered to show him the bodies, and Conein declined.²⁴ Conein reported that he believed Minh had ordered the executions.⁴ The embassy reported that day several versions: that the brothers had spent the night at a Cholon clubhouse owned by a Chinese businessman, gone to church in the morning and been picked up by the army and locked in a vehicle; that Minh had told the former finance minister that they had shot themselves with a gun left in the vehicle "due to an inadvertence"; and that an aide to General Khanh, who saw the bodies, said they had been assassinated at least at the direction of General Mai Huu Xuan.²⁹ Most station reporting attributed the decision to kill them to Minh, and the various reports agreed that the killing was carried out by an officer named Nhung, described variously as Minh's bodyguard and as a supporter of Mai Huu Xuan.⁴ On November 16 an officer of unknown reliability gave the CIA two photographs of the bodies in which their hands appeared tied behind their backs, and said they had been shot and stabbed in the vehicle taking them to the Joint General Staff.²

The news reached Kennedy during a meeting at 9:35 a.m. on November 2, when Forrestal brought in a telegram reporting the deaths.³⁰ Rusk instructed Lodge that the generals should establish publicly that the deaths were suicides "if this true," through an impartial group.³¹ McGeorge Bundy cabled Lodge that evening that the generals "should not be left under illusion that political assassination is easily accepted here."³² The State Department instructed all diplomatic posts, particularly in the Western Hemisphere, to distinguish the Saigon coup from its opposition to military coups against democratic governments elsewhere.³³ Lodge recommended resuming commercial import payments "on a periodic and selective basis without public announcement so as to avoid appearance of blank check or of pay-off."³⁴

The Church Committee concluded that the details of the deaths were not known and that there was no available evidence of direct or indirect American involvement in them.² Taylor, asked in 1981 whether the killing had been a covert operation, answered, "Not if you mean a covert operation conducted by the CIA."³⁵