1. Beecroft, 1
Travis Beecroft
HIST 642
Elkind
May 23, 2014
The CIA in Vietnam
“Vietnam is still with us. It has created doubts about American judgment, about
American credibility, about American power—not only at home, but throughout the
world. It has poisoned our domestic debate. So we paid an exorbitant price for the
decisions that were made in good faith and for good purpose.”1
The seeds of American foreign policy planted during the Cold War period
festered in Vietnam during the twenty-plus years of American involvement. Not only did
this cast doubts on American judgment, credibility, and power, both domestically and
internationally, which Kissinger refers to at the commencement of this paper, it also
damaged the reputation of the CIA’s operative and intelligence wings in the process.
These limbs reached across the globe to act on behalf of the president and the American
government, often against the will of the American people, in the name of policies such
as “containment” and the “Domino Theory,” which sought to prevent the spread of
Communism to regions previously on the periphery of American political interest. In the
process, the American government overextended and exposed the weaknesses of its
foreign policy and their understanding of the Vietnamese culture and political history.
The CIA has received its fair share of the criticism for these failures, although in reality it
simply acts on behalf of a higher organization. In this way, “the CIA is the opening
probe, the agitator or facilitator,” and “it always acts in response to some other
initiative.”2 Those initiatives required the CIA to support a fragile South Vietnamese
government and conduct clandestine counterinsurgency and pacification operations on
1 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1991), 9. Quote by Henry
Kissinger.
2 L. Fletcher Prouty, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F.
Kennedy (New York: Carol Pub. Group, 1992), 50.

2. Beecroft, 2
the ground throughout Vietnam, while gathering intelligence that would, in theory,
contribute to a better understanding of the enemy and accurately assess the effects of the
American military effort. It will be shown that their efforts on the ground were brutal
and ineffective, but although their intelligence at times was faulty, any accurate
intelligence that countered the plans of the president was discarded, leaving the CIA to
shoulder much of the blame that, at times, was not warranted.
The amount of scholarly material on the involvement of the CIA during the war in
Vietnam is extensive and at times overwhelming. With the release of the Pentagon
Papers and other previously classified material, scholars have been granted unparalleled
access to the treasure trove of documents that illuminate American activities in Indochina
from the 1950s until the mid-1970s. These documents, along with sources that were
readily available prior to their declassification, have allowed numerous academics and
amateur researchers the opportunity to discover for themselves the extent of CIA
meddling in North and South Vietnam. Consequently, these primary documents have
facilitated for a plethora of secondary material by scholars who have covered a wide
variety of perspectives, and in turn, they have served as a catalyst for debates on the
morality of their operations and their overall effectiveness. These sources have produced
a well-rounded study of the Vietnam War, perhaps resulting in a comprehensiveness
rivaled only by the scholarship on World War II. This historiographical section will not
feature all of the sources conferred for this paper, but will highlight key contributors to its
development. The scholarship overall reveals that for the most part, earlier accounts of
the CIA’s involvement in Vietnam were either apologetic or extremely critical, while
recent decades have presented a more analytical approach. The release of the Pentagon

3. Beecroft, 3
Papers has contributed to this, as scholars have been able to form more objective analysis,
both derogatory towards and supportive of intelligence efforts.
Among the primary documents most pertinent to the discussion of the CIA’s
involvement in Vietnam are the monographs released in 2009 by former clandestine
services officer Thomas Ahern Jr., who served in South Vietnam and Laos during the
war. Comprising over two thousand pages in six volumes, Ahern’s work provides the
most comprehensive account of CIA operations during the Vietnam War from an
American perspective, four of which have proven to be an invaluable resource for this
paper. The first three of his six volumes specifically deal with the high years of the war
in Vietnam and the crisis of the final evacuation of Saigon. Although not the first to be
published in the series, The CIA and the House of Ngo is an appropriate place to begin
conversation because it details the beginning of CIA involvement in Vietnam during their
period of support for Ngo Dinh Diem, the first president of South Vietnam from 1955
until his assassination in 1963. Ahern explains that American support for Diem was
“complicated from the very start by fundamental disagreements with Diem […] over the
kind of leadership required and the kind of polity to be built,” and “although [the CIA]
cooperated to help Diem deal with the immediate threats to his survival in office, they
developed conflicting approaches to the long-term issue of constructing for him a base of
mass political support.”3 Furthermore, Ahern notes that the task of finding qualified
leaders to launch resistance operations in North Vietnam was ineffective. As multiple
candidates proved their inadequacy in achieving the aims of the CIA, Ngo Dinh Nhu,
3 Thomas L. Ahern, CIA and the House of Ngo: Covert Action in South Vietnam, 1954-
1963 (Texas Tech Vietnam Center and Archive, 2000), 6, accessed February 28, 2014,
http://today.ttu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/02-cia-and-the-house-of-ngo.pdf.

4. Beecroft, 4
Diem’s younger brother “quickly emerged as the most promising of an unimpressive lot,”
and that “in any case, there was nobody else.”4 This was a sentiment felt by the U.S.
towards both Diem and Nhu, and the book highlights their relationship with the CIA until
Diem’s assassination via coup in 1963.
Following this work in terms of historical chronology is CIA and the Generals,
which details the CIA’s political action programs as well as its role in South Vietnamese
elections and secret negotiations from 1964-1975. This book covers the period after
Diem’s assassination until the fall of Saigon in 1975, and begins by explaining that after
the deaths of Diem and Nhu via a CIA-lead coup, CIA Headquarters made concerted
efforts to find the right people to lead the new government in South Vietnam. Ahern
explains that even the person placed in charge of the new South Vietnamese government,
General Nguyen Khanh, the first person to advise the CIA of a serious plan for the coup,
seemed unable to perform the tasks the CIA needed of him. Exemplifying this, Ahern
states that “it became clear to the [CIA] that Nguyen Khanh had no more capacity than
General Minh [leader of the coup against Diem] to unify the officer corps in a new
campaign to mobilize the country against the Viet Cong.”5 As a result, it became clear to
Saigon and the U.S. that Khanh “would require unqualified U.S. support; without it, he
would probably disappear in a neutralist putsch.”6 As it would turn out, the government
in Saigon would deteriorate and Khanh was ousted by a coup in 1965, which elevated
Nguyen Van Thieu to president of South Vietnam. Thieu’s relationship with the U.S. and
4 Ibid, 23.
5 Thomas L. Ahern, CIA and the Generals: Covert Support to Military Government in
South Vietnam (Texas Tech Vietnam Center and Archive, 1998), 19, accessed February
28, 2014. http://today.ttu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/01-cia-and-the-generals.pdf.
6 Ahern, CIA and the Generals, 20.

5. Beecroft, 5
the CIA was on shaky ground as well. Ahern characterizes Thieu as being “suspicio[us]
of U.S. purposes,” and that his “mistrust of the U.S. focused increasingly on the CIA,
which he saw as an ubiquitous power either beyond Washington’s control or being used
by the U.S. government to thwart Saigon’s desires.”7 Ahern addresses the animosity
between the CIA and Thieu surrounding the 1971 Presidential election in South Vietnam,
which resulted in a second term for Thieu. Furthermore, he discusses the events leading
up to the 1968 Tet Offensive and the 1972 Easter Offensive which prompted the famous
quote by CIA officer Thomas Polgar who said that “the illusion that [the] was is over and
we have won is shattered,” a sentiment that began to sweep across CIA headquarters and
throughout the United States as well.8
The third volume in the series entitled CIA and Rural Pacification in South
Vietnam documents efforts made by the CIA to foster support and loyalty amongst the
South Vietnamese peasantry for the Saigon government between 1955 and 1975. In this
book, Ahern describes the six programs the CIA instituted in 1961 they hoped would
provide an active role in village-level counterinsurgency efforts. The first to be
implemented was the Citizen’s Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG), which imposed a
“strictly defensive posture: not only the static village defense element but also the
company-sized mobile unit called Strike Force was devoted exclusively to village
protection.”9 This program’s goal was to protect the mountain villagers, the
Montagnards, in South Vietnam from the Viet Cong, whom they “appeared to hate […] at
7 Ibid, 87.
8 Ibid, 109-111.
9 Thomas L. Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam, (Texas Tech Vietnam
Center and Archive, 2001) 53, accessed February 28, 2014. http://today.ttu.edu/wp-
content/uploads/2009/03/03-cia-and-rural-pacification.pdf.

6. Beecroft, 6
least as much as they did the Diem government.”10 As a result of their efforts, the CIDG
at Buon Enao, the programs first Area Development Center, killed over 200 Viet Cong
and captured over 460 in 1962, a year when they conducted sixteen significant Strike
Force offensive actions.11 The CIDG and the Mountain Scouts program that would
follow focused on “separating the Montagnards from the Viet Cong, ‘thus depriving the
VC of local resources.”12 Two of the subsequent programs, including the Combat Youth
and Combat Intelligence Teams, “relied on the durable anti-Communist fervor of the
Catholic minority, whose favored status in the Diem government spared it the reciprocal
suspicions hat afflicted the efforts with other minorities,” allowing these groups to
survive after the CIA’s presence ceased.13 The two largest programs, the Strategic
Hamlets, focusing on security arrangements, political reforms, and economic
development for the ethnic Vietnamese, and the Force Populaire, also focusing on
security of the rural population, but drew its working-level cadres from the peasantry
instead of the professional bureaucracy, were both originated and associated by Ngo Dinh
Diem and his brothers. As a result, “irreducible structural problems would have made
their failure unavoidable,” even had the Diem regime survived.14
Another in the six-volume series is Ahern’s book entitled The Way We Do
Things: Black Entry Operations into North Vietnam. This book details CIA efforts to
launch clandestine espionage and sabotage missions in North Vietnam until 1963, when
the CIA’s primary role was transferred to the U.S. military. Ahern explains that in 1961,
10 Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam, 46.
11 Ibid, 59.
12 Ibid, 65.
13 Ibid, 95.
14 Ibid, 95.

7. Beecroft, 7
President Kennedy instructed the CIA to “make every possible effort to launch guerilla
operations in North Vietnam territory,” hoping that the North Vietnamese would get “a
taste of their own medicine.”15 The agents sent in would “collect information on the
communists’ security practices for use by airborne teams dropped near their villages and
operating out of otherwise uninhabited safe havens.”16 However, despite the CIA’s
efforts to cause havoc in the North, the program had a series of failures by 1963 and their
lack of “curiosity [or] interest in the causes of known failures” was caused to “inadequate
staffing.”17 Ahern notes that some of these failures could be attributed to “poorly
selected drop zones,” agents’ “almost universal failure to come up on the air [radio] for
weeks after insertion,” and the dependence on a recruiting process that allowed the agents
to “be manipulated into a series of embarrassing and damaging failures in which nearly
all the agents were controlled by the other side.”18 These four books combine to create a
comprehensive report of the CIA’s efforts on the ground in Vietnam and are the bulk of
the primary material used for this paper.
Memoirs will also play a role in the development of this paper, specifically those
by Colonel Edward Lansdale, head of the Saigon Military Mission in Vietnam from
1954-1957, and George W. Allen, a former CIA intelligence analyst specializing on
Vietnam from 1948-1968. Lansdale’s memoir details his roles in the Philippines and
Vietnam where he served as a member of the CIA in an advisory role to Ramon
15 Thomas L. Ahern, The Way We Do Things: Black Entry Operations into North
Vietnam 1961-1964 (Texas Tech Vietnam Center and Archive, 2005) 10, accessed
February 28, 2014. http://today.ttu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/05-the-way-we-do-
things.pdf.
16 Ahern, The Way We Do Things, 11.
17 Ibid, 62.
18 Ibid, 62-63.

8. Beecroft, 8
Magsaysay and Ngo Dinh Diem. Lansdale, a specialist in psychological warfare, trained
South Vietnamese in various tactics and had the SMM perform numerous counter-terror
campaigns against the North Vietnamese, which many would call brutal and at least
controversial. In his memoir, Lansdale is coy about his involvement in Vietnam, and
most of his writing “sentimentalizes or brutalizes people’s motivations.”19 In his review
of Lansdale’s memoir, David Chandler is very critical of Lansdale for this reason, stating
that “historians will not be helped very much by Lansdale’s memoirs, despite his central
role in any account of U.S. involvement in the post-war Philippines and Vietnam in the
years 1954-1956,” and that this is partly because “many of his statements fail to stand up
to checking.”20 It’s hard not to agree with Chandler, who closes his review by
referencing an Italian proverb that says “lies have very short legs,” and that “in spite of
its charm, [Lansdale’s book] is a short-legged book.”21 For that reason, his memoir will
be used selectively and only when necessary.
George Allen’s memoir, on the other hand, is a valuable resource because it does
not gloss over any of the CIA’s involvement in Vietnam. Allen explains that America’s
failure in Vietnam was not simply because “intelligence was lacking, or wrong, but
because it was not in accord with what its consumers wanted to believe, and because its
relevance was outweighed by other factors in the minds of those who made national
security policy decisions.”22 As it will be shown in the development of this paper, many
19 David P. Chandler, review of In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to
Southeast Asia, by Edward Lansdale, The Journal of Asian Studies 34.3, May 1975, 856.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2052584.
20 Chandler, 856.
21 Ibid, 857.
22 George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in
Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), x.

9. Beecroft, 9
CIA analysts were pessimistic about American strategies during the war effort. With this
in mind, Allen hopes to contribute “to the reader’s understanding of the complexities” of
the decision-making process.23 To contextualize this, Allen documents the increased
American involvement in Indochina as it became apparent the French were not going to
defeat the Viet Minh, and the “absence of a viable political rationale to undergird the
Saigon government’s counterinsurgency effort, [which] plagued American efforts
throughout the war.”24 Because of his criticism of the CIA and the bureaucracy involved
in the war’s decision-making, this memoir will serve a much more valuable purpose than
Lansdale’s, and will feature more prominently in the development of this paper.
A fair amount of secondary material focuses on the history of the CIA in general,
which occasional emphasis on the development of the CIA’s role in the Vietnam War.
One such source entitled The CIA and American Democracy by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
details the evolution of the CIA since its inception in 1947 as a result of President
Truman’s National Security Act. In his preface, Jeffreys-Jones acknowledges that his
book “contains no sensational revelations, proceeds in an orthodox chronological manner,
and rests on documentary and verifiable sources.”25 Even so, this book is reliable
because it shows how the Agency was able to operate within the context of American
democracy, and details the pessimism felt by the intelligence community during the war.
Jeffreys-Jones begins his book by explaining that “although the Agency has generally
fulfilled the hope of its founders for an adequate foreign-intelligence capability, its
counsels have sometimes fallen on deaf ears,” because of “the CIA’s lack of proper
23 Allen, None So Blind, x.
24 Ibid, 138.
25 Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989), ix.

10. Beecroft, 10
standing in Washington policymaking circles.”26 This was a sentiment echoed earlier by
George Allen, and will be further echoed by scholars and intelligence analysts throughout
the paper. It would be one thing for the president to ignore faulty information, but
Jeffreys-Jones is critical of the U.S. government and their dismissal of reliable analysis,
and as a result, CIA intelligence analysts given an unfair share of the blame in the failed
efforts by the United States in Vietnam.
L. Fletcher Prouty’s book entitled JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to
Assassinate John F. Kennedy, and Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, will also be
used in the development of this paper. Prouty’s book is an account of the “power elite
and of its activities on an international scale during the Cold War, from 1943-1990.”27 Is
essential argument is that “no major event during [that] period was the result of chance.
Each was craftily and systematically planned by a power elite.”28 He organizes his book
around this notion and “present[s] an analysis of selected events of the past fifty years
that have changed the course of history in the United States and the world.”29
Specifically related to Vietnam, Prouty discusses the role Vietnam played in the Cold
War, and details the CIA’s Saigon Military Mission, the exodus of civilians from North
Vietnam to South Vietnam, and the overall strategy and tactics used by the CIA in
Indochina to win a proxy-war. This will be a valuable resource because it also discusses
the role of the CIA as a governmental agency, and the relationship the CIA and President
Kennedy shared during his time in office. Karnow’s Vietnam: A History is an all-
encompassing account of the Vietnam War is Stanley Karnow in his book Vietnam: A
26 Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy, ix.
27 Prouty, JFK, xxvii.
28 Ibid, xxviii.
29 Ibid, xxviii.

11. Beecroft, 11
History. Using a perspective he developed during his time in France before the war and
Vietnam during the war, Karnow is able to “produce a panoramic account that, while
concentrating primarily on the American intervention, would also describe and analyze
the origins of the contemporary conflict.”30 Karnow, along with many others, also
introduces his readers to Edward Lansdale and documents the tactics used by the SMM
during his time in Vietnam. Furthermore, she details the CIA’s Phoenix Program, lead
by William Colby, which took the lives of thousands of Viet Cong in the hopes of
damaging their political infrastructure. Both will be valuable resources for this paper.
At the end of World War II, with the Soviet Union emerging as a threat to its
Western Allies, there was a general agreement between the Truman Administration and
Congress about the need for a peacetime central intelligence service, however, the form
this service would take was debated. With the passage of President Truman’s 1947
National Security Act, which included a provision for the establishment of the CIA, for
the first time the government “gave democratic legislative sanction to a foreign-
intelligence agency, and […] officially approved those intelligence guidelines on which
there was a common agreement.”31 After its inception, it was believed that the CIA
“might possibly be useful in time of war, but not in peace, when there was no justification
for the idea that ‘political and intelligence activities’ would be ‘completely dominated by
the Armed Forces’ through the CIA.”32 By 1948, the United States was eager to prevent
the spread of Soviet Communist influence and it was concluded by the Joint Chiefs of
Staff that “the United States should have the means to support foreign resistance
30 Karnow, Vietnam: A History, xi-xii.
31 Jeffreys-Jones, 24.
32 Ibid, 38. Quote by former OSS officer William A. Eddy.

12. Beecroft, 12
movements in guerilla warfare, and that peacetime responsibility in this regard should be
that of the CIA.” 33 They also agreed to give the CIA “primary responsibility for
conducting psychological and unconventional—including guerilla—warfare activities.”34
For those who sponsored the creation of the National Security Act, they understood that
“no matter what was written into the law, the CIA, under a cloak of secrecy, could be
manipulated to do everything that was requested of it later.”35 This paved the way for the
CIA’s covert involvement in Vietnam.
The first task for the CIA in Vietnam after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu
was to support Ngo Dinh Diem, an anti-Communist Catholic who took office in 1954 and
was chosen by the United States to represent the new South Vietnamese government.
Even though U.S. officials thought Diem was “incapable of succeeding, [they] saw him
as the only candidate for leadership of an anti-Communist South Vietnam.”36 When it
became clear that Diem was faced with opposition in the form of the French dominated
Vietnamese military, the CIA, under the guise of the newly created Saigon Military
Mission (SMM), undertook their “biggest task [of] keep[ing] Ngo Dinh Diem alive.”37
To do this, the SMM enlisted an elite guard for Diem’s protection, and “in a series of
adroit political moves [they] helped Diem gradually extend his authority in the creation
of a central government.”38 It soon became clear that “without CIA intervention on his
33 Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare,
Counterinsurgency, and Counter-Terrorism 1940-1990 (New York: Pantheon Books,
1992), 28.
34 McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft, 29.
35 Prouty, 19.
36 Ahern, CIA and the House of Ngo, 73.
37 Prouty, 67.
38 Ibid, 63.

13. Beecroft, 13
behalf Diem would not have survived six months in office.”39 To build local support for
Diem prior to the 1955 election, the SMM implemented numerous propaganda techniques
that would steer the election in his favor. In one instance, a member of the SMM ordered
one million tiny phonograph toys equipped with a brief recording of a political speech
made by Diem. “The villagers, who had never seen or heard of anything like this before,
were astounded,” and that “such modern ‘witchcraft’ as this ‘voice in a box’ helped
guarantee the election of Diem” with 98% of the vote.40 So imperative was the support
given by the SMM that “none of this could have happened without the skillful undercover
work of the CIA and its experienced Saigon Military Mission.”41
In the years after achieving victory for Diem in the election, the CIA conducted
numerous pacification and counterinsurgency efforts in the South Vietnamese
countryside in the hopes of winning over the rural peasant population by playing an
“active role in village-level counterinsurgency in South Vietnam” against the Viet
Cong.42 The six programs instituted in 1961, including the Citizens Irregular Defense
Groups (CIDG), Mountain Scouts, the Combat Youth and Combat Intelligence teams, the
Strategic Hamlets, and the Force Populaire, achieved varying levels of success. For
instance, the goals of the CIDG were to ensure village protection, avoid “pursuit of the
enemy’s regular forces,” and to “‘give [the villagers] something to fight for and
something to fight with,’” without “creat[ing] a professional army.”43 In doing this, the
39 Ahern, CIA and the House of Ngo, 56.
40 Prouty, 68-69.
41 Ibid, 69.
42 Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam, 41.
43 Ibid, 53.

14. Beecroft, 14
CIDG was able to kill over 200 Viet Cong and capture over 460 at Buon Enao in 1962.44
The Strategic Hamlets program, for example, which sought to create new communities of
rural peasants that would be isolated from the Viet Cong, “disposed of very large material
resources, mostly American, which offered “an improved standard of living” for the
affected peasants.”45 In sum, there were about 13,000 hamlets in South Vietnam,46 and
“even where the Strategic Hamlet program provoked peasant hostility, it created genuine
problems for the [Viet Cong] political and military organization in the countryside.”47
Despite the benefits these programs offered, they were still deemed to be
unsuccessful. Regarding the CIDG, because of its defensive posture, it was unable to
maintain a powerful presence in the mountain regions, and eventually, there was “limited
CIDG success in creating reciprocal bonds of loyalty between the Montagnards and the
government.”48 The CIDG also “had no potential to reduce VC access to and influence
over the lowland Vietnamese majority.”49 On the other hand, while the Strategic Hamlets
created an improved standard of living for some involved, they “largely failed to attract
voluntary participation” which would have produced greater levels of success.50
Moreover, because many hamlets were scattered far across the countryside, “some
hamlets […] would be under quite firm governmental control while more remote hamlets
in the same village would be ‘out of bounds’ for government forces and fully under
44 Ibid, 59.
45 Ibid, 83.
46 Allen, 222.
47 Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification, 84.
48 Ibid, 59.
49 Ibid, 73.
50 Ibid, 83.

15. Beecroft, 15
Communist control.”51 The disappointment of the pacification efforts can be attributed to
the fact that “the Agency understood the insurgency little better than did the rest of the
bureaucracy.”52 These efforts failed to produce the desired results because “almost none
of the civil bureaucracy [in Saigon was] in direct touch with the peasantry” and that “the
Army constituted the only organ of government with a widespread rural influence.”53
Perhaps most importantly, the programs “had little political impact in attracting the
loyalty of the people—‘winning their hearts and minds’—because they were conducted
in a political vacuum,” facilitated by Diem’s inability to win over minority groups,
something vitally important to ensure the stability of an already fragile regime.54
Despite the CIA’s efforts to build support for Diem in South Vietnam, he was still
detested by many for the distance he created between his bureaucracy and the minority
groups, which constituted a large percentage of the population. When it became clear in
1960 “that dissidence among non-Communists in Saigon was on the rise” and that
General Tran Van Minh was attempting to “identify potential coup participants,” the CIA
needed to do all it could to keep Diem alive or, after growing tired of Diem’s numerous
inabilities, watch the events unfold.55 At first, the CIA did whatever they could to keep
Diem in power. They had successfully turned a 1960 mutiny attempt by a number of
paratroopers into lengthy negotiations that would “preserve [Diem’s] role ‘as the leader
in the…anti-Communist battle.’”56 Because Diem’s opposition in this instance “lack[ed]
any kind of political program or even serious interest in power, [they] were easily
51 Allen, 220.
52 Ahern, CIA and Rural Pacification in South Vietnam, xiv.
53 Ibid, 5.
54 Allen, 140.
55 Ahern, CIA and the House of Ngo, 140.
56 Ibid, 140.

16. Beecroft, 16
outmaneuvered,” and their attempted mutiny “did little more than intensify mutual
distrust.”57 With American frustration of Diem escalating, it was decided that “‘more
aggressive probing’ for possible replacements should ‘Diem’s government disappear.’”58
By late June 1963, rumors of another attempted coup towards Diem were swirling, and
again “the U.S. stood firmly behind the regime and hoped to influence it in the right
direction,” and that “‘rash attempt to knock it over’ would benefit only the Viet Cong.”59
By August 1963, however, it seemed as though American policymakers had turned sour
on the idea of continuing their support of the Diem regime, and Henry Cabot Lodge sent
a cable to Washington stating “‘we are launched on a course from which there is no
respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government.’”60 A few months later
in October, Lodge “confirmed that America would ‘not thwart’ the coup” should there be
one.61 Shortly afterwards, President Kennedy stated to Lodge that “‘once a coup under
responsible leadership has begun…it is in the interest of U.S. government that it should
succeed.’”62 By November, coordination between Vietnamese General Don and the
CIA’s Major Lucien Conein had produced a satisfactory plan for the assassination, and
on November 2, 1963, Diem and his brother Nhu were shot at “point-blank from the gun
turret with an automatic weapon,” then sprayed with bullets and stabbed “repeatedly with
a knife,” thus bringing an end to the Diem regime.63
57 Ibid, 144.
58 Ibid, 151.
59 Ibid, 168-169.
60 Ahern, CIA and the House of Ngo, 181.
61 Karnow, 314.
62 Ibid, 317.
63 Ibid,

17. Beecroft, 17
In addition to supporting the Diem government through pacification efforts and
ultimately participating in the coup against him, the CIA also conducted numerous
counterinsurgency efforts throughout Vietnam. The man chosen to head the SMM in its
first years was Colonel Edward Lansdale, “a deceptively mild, self-effacing former
advertising executive” who had served as a member of the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS) during WWII. It was his job to “assist the Vietnamese in counter-guerilla training
and to advise as necessary on governmental measures for resistance to Communist
actions.”64 In doing this, he and the SMM performed numerous psychological warfare
tactics intended to build support for the south and weaken the Viet Cong. 65 Among their
efforts were initiatives that involved “a number of psy-war-gambits to stir up the
population in Tonkin in the months before the French evacuation,” which included
“spreading rumors that Chinese divisions had moved into the country in a rampage of
rape and destruction.”66 The SMM also invested heavily in propaganda material,
including the “use of radio, newspapers, leaflets delivered by the millions […] posters,
slogans, exhibits, motion pictures […] and specialized advertising,” in order “to do
everything possible to exploit the nationalistic feelings of the people in an attempt to
unite” South Vietnam.67 The SMM also “polluted petroleum supplies, bombed the post
offices, wrote and distributed millions of anti-Vietminh leaflets, [and] printed and
distributed counterfeit money.”68 In essence, the SMM was “designed to ‘raise hell’ with
‘guerilla operations’ everywhere in Indochina,” while serving as “a skilled terrorist
64 Edward G. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia
(New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 127.
65 Karnow, 236.
66 McClintock, 127.
67 Prouty, 60.
68 Ibid, 71.

18. Beecroft, 18
organization capable of carrying out its sinister role in accordance with the Grand
Strategy of the Cold War years.”69
As leader of Lansdale’s northern unit, Major Lucien Conein, “a rough-and-
tumbler officer […] who had fought against the Germans with the French resistance
during WWII,” was instructed to sabotage the transportation network in anticipation of
the Vietminh takeover.70 In doing this, Conein and his agents “laced the oil destined for
Hanoi’s trams with acid, and they concealed explosives in the piles of coal that fueled
railway locomotives.”71 However, due to “the rigid Communist control structure, a
tightly knit web of local cadres and informers,” only “a few” of 80 teams Conein sent to
the north survived.72 Eventually, one agent who quit the project in disgust claimed that “I
didn’t mind butchering the enemy, but we were butchering out own allies.”73 The
enterprise into the north continued, however, “a futile endeavor designed mainly to
gratify that Saigon leaders, who derived satisfaction from the illusion that they were
avenging themselves against their northern foes.”74 Despite the SMM’s efforts, Lansdale
and Conein provided the CIA with another setback, as they failed to topple the
Communist government in North Vietnam via a “series of sabotage and psychological-
rumor operations.”75 Because of these failures, it can be said that “the SMM’s successes
were little more than costly terrorist pranks of little military significance.”76
69 Ibid, 58.
70 Karnow, 237.
71 Ibid, 237.
72 Ibid, 378.
73 Ibid, 378.
74 Ibid, 378.
75 Jeffreys-Jones, 95.
76 McClintock, 128.

19. Beecroft, 19
By the 1960s, “the CIA was first off the mark to respond to the call for action and
innovation, and Vietnam became ‘a sort of proving ground for both [sic] ideas, tactics,
and equipment’ of counterinsurgency.”77 These new tactics would be implemented with
two CIA programs that cast the darkest shadow on the Agency’s involvement in Vietnam.
The first, Operation Black Eye, began in the early 1960s and was an example of the
“phrasing of a threat,” in psychological warfare because it “generalized an uncertain
threat” that was intended to disconcert the populace at large.”78 This operation was
carried out by South Vietnamese troops that were organized into terror squads and
worked with rural agents to penetrate Viet Cong-held areas. These troops would sneak
into the homes of suspected key Viet Cong leaders and murder them while they were
sleeping. Left behind “on each of the bodies was a piece of paper printed with a
grotesque human eye,” and in many instances these pieces of paper were pinned to the
front door of a house suspected of harboring Viet Cong agents, symbolizing the notion
that “big brother is watching you.”79 In a 1966 Army Study, it was concluded that
although this operation was brutal in its practice, in actuality, the “generalized terror
‘seem[ed] to have limited effectiveness over a period of time,’ reaching ‘a point of
diminishing returns’ when the population either ‘breaks’ or ‘focuses hostility on some
objective it perceives, correctly or not, as the source of the treat.”80 While the CIA
thought this would have been an effective operation, it in fact was not.
The most brutal CIA operation during the entire war was dubbed the Phoenix
Program, which began in 1968 was to “‘root out’ the Viet Cong political apparatus
77 Ibid, 131.
78 Ibid, 240-241.
79 Ibid, 240.
80 Ibid, 241.

20. Beecroft, 20
‘through counterterrorism’” efforts.81 The CIA had proposed that all of the U.S.
intelligence agencies pool their information on the infrastructure of the Viet Cong
together, and that in theory, “centralizing [the intelligence] factions under sound
management” would cause “the rural apparatus on which the Viet Cong relied for
recruits, food, money and asylum [to] be crushed.”82 This policy “sought to identify and
‘neutralize Viet Cong leaders on the village level.”83 However, the definition of
“neutralize” was unclear, and consequently, “the non-definition of alternative means and
local outbreaks of mayhem and blood feuding meant that the program degenerated into a
counterproductive bloodbath.”84 Troops for the program were “recruited, organized,
supplied, and directly paid [counterterror] teams” and they were “to use Viet Cong
techniques of terror—assassination, ambushes, kidnappings, and intimidation—against
the [Viet Cong] leadership—the ‘fight fire with fire’ rationale.”85 For Saigon officials,
the program “functioned as a vehicle for […] extortion,” and their ability to “eliminate
their rivals, or solidify power.”86 Although the South Vietnamese did most of the killing,
the program was “entirely American and largely the initiative of the CIA.”87 Depending
on the source, American estimates the Viet Cong deaths ranged from around 20,000,88 to
81 Frank Snepp, Decent Interval: An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End Told By
the CIA’s Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1977), 12.
82 Karnow, 616.
83 Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance,
1950 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1977), 246.
84 Jeffreys-Jones, 166.
85 McClintock, 192.
86 Prados, Safe for Democracy, 363.
87 Jeffreys-Jones, 166-167.
88 William Colby and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (London:
Hutchinson, 1978), 270.

21. Beecroft, 21
about 60,000.89 An estimate conducted by the South Vietnamese government estimated
the number of deaths to be around 41,000.90 All the same, “instead of winning […] the
hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, “the program caused many Vietnamese to hate their
American allies. They viewed the United States as a sponsor of the worst kind of
terrorism.”91 This program, perhaps more than any reason, helped contribute to the
demise of the American legitimacy worldwide, and domestically antiwar activists labeled
it as “mass murder.”92
Intelligence gathering was also an important function of the CIA during the
Vietnam War. It is a common preconception that the CIA did not have enough area
specialists to accurately predict and assess the reactions of the Vietnamese people. “In
fact,” however, “there was no shortage of Southeast Asian specialists in the foreign
affairs and intelligence arms of the U.S. government,” it was just that “they were rarely
consulted, and their written assessments were consistently dismissed or ignored.”93 Sure,
at times the CIA had incorrectly estimated the extent of various campaigns effectiveness.
In one case, a CIA analyst was “almost certain” that the U.S. air strikes during President
Johnson’s Operation Rolling Thunder in 1965 would deter the enemy, but that the North
Vietnamese would “‘probably avoid actions’ that might bring ‘the great weight of U.S.
weaponry’ down upon them.”94 In another case, a CIA assessment “failed to predict
North Vietnam’s response to infiltrating regular troops into the South under the cover of
89 Prouty, 328.
90 Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York:
Knopf, 1974), 237.
91 Joseph Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (Roseville: Forum, 2001), 338.
92 Karnow, 617.
93 Allen, xi.
94 Karnow, 417.

22. Beecroft, 22
secrecy” after Rolling Thunder bombings.95 However, that same CIA assessment
correctly argued “that the bombing would not stop Viet Cong attacks, ‘and that North
Vietnam might in anticipation of international sympathy evoked by the bombing, ‘decide
to intensify the struggle.’”96 Another CIA analyst correctly assessed that Operation
Rolling Thunder’s bombing campaign “did not impair the flow of men and materials into
South Vietnam.”97 Even CIA director Richard Helms “knew perfectly well that the U.S.
bombing and ground fighting tactics were doing little to destroy the military thereat
posed by Vietnamese Communist forces.”98 Furthermore, when trying to get an accurate
estimate about the fighting strength of the Viet Cong, the CIA assigned a Harvard
Graduate named Sam Adams to calculate a total number, which he found to be around
600,000. This was a stark contrast to the 270,000 General Westmoreland and advocates
of escalation believed were there, and even though Adams was closer in his assessment,
“his superiors ignored his report, tried to suppress it, and made no effort to place it on the
desk of the president,” knowing that might ruin their plans for escalation.99
In 1964 it was even noted by CIA analyst Willard Matthias that the situation in
Vietnam “at best augured a ‘prolonged stalemate’ and he suggested a negotiated
settlement ‘based upon neutralization’ of Southeast Asia.”100 However, it soon became
clear to CIA analysts that “the problem was that if you believed that the policy being
pursued was going to be a flat failure, and you said so, you were going to be out of
95 Jeffreys-Jones, 148.
96 Ibid, 148.
97 Ibid, 169.
98 Ibid, 168.
99 Ibid, 169.
100 Karnow, 419.

23. Beecroft, 23
business. In expressing such an opinion you would lose all influence.”101 This is because
“it seemed that the president, as the repository of democratically conferred sovereignty,
had to emerge the unconditional victor in any clash with an intelligence chief.”102 This
was most evident when Robert McNamara resigned after his request to cut back
Operation Rolling Thunder was declined by President Johnson, which made it clear that
“CIA pessimism therefore failed to have an impact either directly or through the
disenchanted Secretary of Defense.”103 This pessimism prevented analysts from
producing accurate assessments, and “the demoralized Agency’s failure to communicate
the message about Vietnam lead to expensive reverses that adversely affected U.S.
prestige, the economy […] and the presidency itself.”104 The presidents, in their attempt
to exert whatever authority they could over military strategy during the Vietnam War,
“simply ‘damned the torpedoes’—the negative and pessimistic intelligence estimates—as
they forged ahead” with their policy.105 As a result, “by disregarding or suppressing the
CIA’s accurate evaluations of the progress of the Vietnam War, the White House
undoubtedly insured that the nation floundered ever more deeply into a quagmire that
sapped America’s strength and prestige.”106
The efforts made by the CIA on the ground in Vietnam were often ruthless and
ineffective. The attempt to support the Diem regime simply because there were no
adequate alternatives resulted in a government that alienated most of its population. The
CIA’s pacification efforts in the mountains and countryside failed to win over the
101 Jeffreys-Jones, 171-172.
102 Ibid, 152.
103 Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 385.
104 Jeffreys-Jones, 172.
105 Allen, xi.
106 Jeffreys-Jones, 139.

24. Beecroft, 24
peasantry, and as a result, disdain for the regime rose and it succumbed to a coup
orchestrated by the organization that had once protected it. The various psychological
warfare and counterinsurgency programs conducted by Edward Lansdale and the SMM
killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, and put a black eye on the reputation of
the CIA and the American government as a whole in the process. It can be said that
“counterinsurgency somehow combined both the arrogance of colonial power and the
unlimited violence of modern warfare; the methods of firepower of convention war were
combined with the strictly military side of the unconventional, without regard for the
consequences.”107 While at times CIA intelligence failed to accurately foreshadow the
impact of American military strategy, more often than not there were extreme levels of
pessimism felt by the CIA towards our policy, and when they were right in their analysis,
it was overlooked by a president who sought to achieve his own ends within the scope of
“containment,” “the Domino Theory,” or even personal ego. In the end, “the problem in
Vietnam […] was not evil leaders or faulty arithmetic a much as it was a lack of strategic
thinking […] it was a fundamental question of the soundness of our policy, of our whole
approach to the war” that resulted in our failure in Vietnam.108 Now understanding the
role the president played in overlooking accurate intelligence, can the weight of blame
placed on the intelligence community be transferred onto his shoulders instead? And,
referencing Kissinger’s quote at the beginning of the paper, were the decisions made in
good faith and for good purpose, given the atrocity of the acts committed, and the
omission of reliable intelligence from the decision making process? I think not.
107 McClintock, 273.
108 Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato:
Presidio Press, 1982), 182. Quote by George W. Allen.

25. Beecroft, 25
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