CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes 1962-1968

by Harold P. Ford

This study examines three episodes between 1962 and 1968 when US policymakers faced critical points in the evolution of US involvement in Vietnam. During that period, CIA assessments and senior Agency personalities had at least the potential for significantly affecting policy decisions taken by Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

The American involvement in South Vietnam had three main aspects. The first was the military, pitting the American and South Vietnamese forces against Communist guerrillas. The second was the effort to build national political institutions. The third was the struggle to suppress the Viet Cong and win the loyalty of the peasantry. This final aspect was best displayed in the work of the CIA officers who supported and helped to shape the Saigon government’s effort to defeat the insurgency.

In 1955, the new Prime Minister of South Vietnam, Ndo Dinh Diem, had no political support from the population except for a modest following in Central Vietnam. He had several strengths, though: an iron will, American support, the loyalty of the Catholic minority, and the temporary inactivity of the Southern Communist organization, some 90,000 of whose activists were about to be re-grouped to the North. It was in these circumstances that the Central Intelligence Agency began to develop the first of the programs that eventually became the core of the pacification campaign in South Vietnam that America supported.

The CIA agents' experience with rural pacification demonstrates both the enormity of the challenge and the (often inadequate) ways in which the Agency dealt with it. The CIA was the first American agency to consider the Vietnamese insurgency a political matter. However, the correspondence between the Saigon CIA station and the CIA Headquarters reveals many wrong assumptions, which stemmed from the similar beliefs of the CIA agents and the American government about what they should be doing in Vietnam.

The most damaging to the CIA understanding of the Communist insurgency assumption was that the Viet Cong guerrillas were relying mainly on coercion – "terror" – to maintain their presence in the countryside. Although this myth was frequently dispelled by experience, it persisted and controlled the thinking behind the programs proposed and supported by the CIA, just as it controlled the rest of the American strategy in South Vietnam. The Cold Warrior mindset of the agents made it easy for them to imagine helpless South Vietnamese peasants suffering under the Communist invader and waiting to be saved. Even when they acknowledged the obvious effectiveness of Viet Cong popularity, they dismissed it as temporary, something that would fail once the pacification programs correct Diem's mistakes in the villages.

Even in regions where Communist dominance was longterm, the agents persistently assigned the peasants' Communist sympathies to their ignorance of the existence of better alternatives. They did not acknowledge the Viet Cong and the rural population might have common interests and goals. Only sometimes did it dawn on the CIA agents that the Communists, far from being foreign and unwanted, had deep connections with the villagers, but such revelations hardly influenced American policy.

In addition, according to the CIA's own reports, their agents and other American officials thought of the Viet Cong as of ordinary outlaws. If Diem's regime was legitimate and allegedly had good intentions, they saw no reason for the peasants to overthrow him to install a government whose authority depended on terror. However, the Vietnamese conflict was, in fact, a civil war, and the Communists were just as politically legitimate as Diem's government. The CIA agents were in denial, though, which prevented them from assessing the situation properly.

The Viet Cong methods for recruiting, organizing, and administering were not, of course, gently persuasive only. Even before 1965, when the Communist demand for manpower intensified, peasants under Communist control were complaining of conscription, heavy taxation, regimentation, harsh travel controls, and violent retribution for the uncooperative. Nevertheless, coercion, especially as a means of recruitment, was not a main tool. The Communists devoted enormous effort to the “conversion” of conscripts and even of men blackmailed into serving the Viet Cong.

The CIA did not took any of the aforementioned into account. Its agents refused to admit the positive motivation of many, if not most, Viet Cong recruits and the web of family and other personal relationships that bound even the most passive villagers to the Communist guerrillas. Furthermore, the Central Intelligence Agency rarely recognized that Diem's regime was considered despotic and corrupt by the rural population and distanced the Prime Minister from his people.

Most importantly, throughout all the twenty-one years of the war, the CIA did not conduct a single comprehensive study of the struggle that pitted the Saigon government against the Hanoi Communists while both vied for the allegiance of the peasant masses. That deprived American intelligence- and policy-makers of the ability to informedly predict the likely outcome and to challenge that Diem's regime had to be supported by the majority of the Vietnamese population because it was approved by the United States and the United Nations. For many a Vietnamese, that was simply not the case.

Albeit a short book, CIA AND THE VIETNAM POLICYMAKERS provides an insightful analysis of the judgements the agents of the Central Intelligence Agency made regarding Vietnam, the impact those decisions had, or rather did not have, on American policy towards South Vietnam, and they way the CIA decision-making contributed to the making of the Vietnamese disaster. It will broaden Vietnam buffs' understanding of the reasons behind the failure of thr American government's counterinsurgency efforts in South Vietnam.

[Mike Harper · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is essential reading for anyone intrigued by the question, how the hell did we get into that war?

[Liam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not particularly enjoyable to read, even by "official government report" standards. It was, however, of interest at a handful of points; it does contain a fair amount of information about the internal conflicts among decision makers within the U.S. Government regarding the conduct of the war in Viet Nam from a more-or-less official C.I.A. point of view. While problematic from an objective historical standpoint, this work is nevertheless valuable for that reason aside from any other consideration. Given the fact that many of the officials involved with these matters eventually wrote books and/or made other public statements presenting their own particular individual recollections and points of view, perhaps the most valuable contribution of this present work is to compare and contrast these with the official viewpoint of the C.I.A.

While I personally regard the minutiae of U.S. Government decision-making to be far and away the most boring & least pleasant area within the history of the Indo-China conflict about which to read or study, it is still an important aspect of that history and therefore worth reading about. One cannot, after all, develop an understanding of the implementation or results of this or that aspect of foreign policy without having at least a basic understanding of what that policy was and, if possible, how it was formulated. I do realise there are others who, unlike me, find this sort of thing interesting. Those people may well find this slim volume to be absolutely fascinating, or even enjoyable to read, but I most definitely did not.