US Paramilitary Assistants to South Vietnam: Insurgency, Subversion and Public Order (Cold War History)

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US INTERNAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE TO SOUTH VIETNAM William Rosenau

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US Internal Security Assistance to South Vietnam Insurgency, subversion and public order

William Rosenau

ISBN 978-0-415-36998-5

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US Internal Security Assistance to South Vietnam

At the height of the Cold War, the United States used foreign police and paramilitary assistance to combat the spread of communist revolution in the developing world. Support to the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam became the single largest internal security program during the 1955–1963 period. Yet despite presidential attention and a sustained campaign to transform Diem’s police and paramilitary forces into modern, professional forces, the United States failed to achieve its objectives. Using recently declassified government records, this book offers the first fulllength assessment of America’s struggle to remake Diem’s internal security forces into ‘mirror images’ of US police institutions. Operating at the zenith of America’s national self-confidence, policy-makers in Washington and police advisors on the ground in South East Asia were convinced that exporting US law enforcement techniques and values to Vietnam would help establish that country as a secure, progressive, and pro-Western nation. Analysing how and why the US campaign in South Vietnam failed, this volume sheds new light on the broader US program of assistance to ‘free world’ internal security forces during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Today, as the United States and its allies confront insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the global threat posed by al-Qa’ida, the challenge of building foreign internal security forces, and the demands of ‘nation-building’, have again become urgent priorities. The US experience in Vietnam serves as a cautionary tale and highlights the perils of imposing American notions about public order. This book will be of much interest to students of US foreign policy, Intelligence Studies, Cold War Studies, the Vietnam War and Security Studies in general. William Rosenau is a political scientist at the RAND Corporation’s Washington Office, and an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is the co-author of Confronting ‘The Enemy Within’: Security Intelligence, Police and Counterterrorism in Four Democracies (RAND Corporation, 2004).

Cass series: Cold War history Series editors: Odd Arne Westad and Michael Cox

In the new history of the Cold War that has been forming since 1989, many of the established truths about the international conflict that shaped the latter half of the twentieth century have come up for revision. The present series is an attempt to make available interpretations and materials that will help further the development of this new history, and it will concentrate in particular on publishing expositions of key historical issues and critical surveys of newly available sources. 1

Reviewing the Cold War Approaches, interpretations, and theory Edited by Odd Arne Westad

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British and American Anticommunism before the Cold War Marrku Ruotsila

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US Internal Security Assistance to South Vietnam Insurgency, subversion and public order William Rosenau

US Internal Security Assistance to South Vietnam Insurgency, subversion and public order William Rosenau

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2005 William Rosenau Typeset in Times by GreenGate Publishing Services, Tonbridge, Kent Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-36998-3

Contents

Contents Preface and acknowledgements Abbreviatons Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

v vii ix 1

Eisenhower, US foreign internal security assistance and the struggle for the developing world

9

Shoring up America’s man: the origins of police and paramilitary assistance to South Vietnam, 1954–6

28

The struggle for reform: the United States and Diem’s internal security forces, 1956–8

47

Competing conceptions: the United States, Diem and the Civil Guard, 1955–61

60

John F. Kennedy, foreign internal security assistance, and the challenge of ‘subterranean war’

77

‘Ridiculous representatives of Mr Diem’: paramilitary forces and the Strategic Hamlet Program, 1961–3

101

American universalism and the triumph of technique: the Kennedy administration and civilian police reform in South Vietnam

120

Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

137 146 147 191 212

Preface and acknowledgements

My interest in the topic of foreign internal security assistance began a decade ago while I was serving on the staff of the US Department of Defense Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces. During the course of a study on the use of the military for law-enforcement and public-order purposes, I began exploring the largely forgotten history of US support to foreign police and paramilitary forces before and during the Cold War. Vietnam was a particularly intriguing case study. Despite the scale of the American commitment, and the veritable tsunami of scholarly literature on the war, almost nothing had been written on US internal security support to the Diem government. As a research student in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, University of London, I had the luxury of spending four years considering the subject in depth. While at King’s, it was my great fortune to have had as my supervisor Professor Saki Dockrill, one of Britain’s leading historians of the Cold War. I benefited (and continue to benefit) in countless ways from her instruction. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Dr Jack Cann of the Command and Staff College, Marine Corps University, and Dr Nigel Ashton, London School of Economics, who served as my examiners. Their insightful comments during my viva helped me to create a substantially stronger piece of work. For their advice, hospitality, and inspiration, I would like to acknowledge Dr Geraint Hughes, Dr Warwick Brown, Mr Tony Hampshire, Adam Holloway MP, Miss Laura Sandys, Mr and Mrs Richard Morrissey, Mr Peter Nash, and the members of the Air Power Policy Seminar, particularly Dr Robert Mullins, Mr Peter N.G. Schwartz, and Mr I.D. Brown. I also owe particular thanks to the US Army Military History Institute, which generously awarded me a Ridgeway Advanced Research Grant, and to the Department of War Studies, which kindly gave me a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Scholarship. The RAND Corporation was a uniquely benevolent employer during this project, and I want to recognize colleagues who kindly provided me with staff development funds: Ms Natalie Crawford (Project Air Force); Mr Kevin O’Connell (Intelligence Policy Center); and Dr Adele Palmer and Dr Richard Darilek (Research Staff Management Department). I would also like to thank Ms Nancy Rizor, who on her own time gave me invaluable editorial and logistical help.

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Preface and acknowledgements

Despite the passage of more than 40 years, police and paramilitary assistance to the Diem regime remains shrouded in government secrecy. My primary research would have been impossible without the patient and skilled assistance of the archivists at the Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collection, East Lansing, Michigan; the Public Record Office, Kew; the National Archives, College Park, Maryland; the John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts, and Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas, whose senior archivist, Mr David Haight, offered invaluable guidance. I would also like to thank Mr Andrew Humphrys of Taylor and Francis for commissioning this book and seeing it through to publication. Likewise, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers who provided many useful comments and suggestions. Any errors, of course, remain mine alone. Finally, and most importantly, I must acknowledge my family, and in particular, my wife, Anne Ginsburgh Rosenau, and my son, W.N.H. Rosenau, who endured with grace and good humour my frequent absences, erratic schedule, and long hours at the computer. Without their steadfast support, this book would never have been possible.

Abbreviations

AID ARVN BRIAM CIA CIP CINCPAC CORDS CPB CPD DDEL DDRS DOD DOS DRV ECA FBI FLN FO FOA FOIA FRUS GPO IACP ICA JCS JFKL LBJL MAAG MACV MCP MIT MSA MSP

Agency for International Development Army of the Republic of Vietnam British Advisory Mission Vietnam Central Intelligence Agency Counter-insurgency Plan Commander in Chief, Pacific Command Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support Civil Police Branch Civil Police Division Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library Declassified Documents Reference System Department of Defense Department of State Democratic Republic of Vietnam Economic Cooperation Administration Federal Bureau of Investigation Front de Libération Nationale Foreign Office Foreign Operations Administration US Freedom of Information Act Foreign Relations of the United States Government Printing Office International Association of Chiefs of Police International Cooperation Administration Joint Chiefs of Staff John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library Military Assistance Advisory Command Military Assistance Command Vietnam Malayan Communist Party Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mutual Security Agency Mutual Security Program

x Abbreviations MSU MSUAHC MSUG NACP NATO NLF NSAM NSC OCB OIDP OISP OPS PAVN PLAF POI PRO PSD RG SCAP SDC SEATO SEPES USIA USOM USVNR VBI VNA VWP WH

Michigan State University Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections Michigan State University Group National Archives at College Park North Atlantic Treaty Organization National Liberation Front National Security Action Memorandum National Security Council Operations Coordinating Board Overseas Internal Defense Policy Overseas Internal Security Program Office of Public Safety People’s Army of Vietnam People’s Liberation Armed Forces Program of Instruction Public Record Office Public Safety Division Record Group Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers Self-Defense Corps South East Asia Treaty Organization Service des Études Politiques, Économiques et Sociales US Information Agency United States Operations Mission United States–Vietnam Relations Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation Vietnamese National Army (later ARVN) Vietnamese Workers Party White House

Introduction

During the 1950s, the developing world emerged as a major security concern for the United States. The rapid withdrawal of the European colonial powers from Africa and Asia after the Second World War created what would be called the ‘Third World’ lying between the capitalist First World and the communist Second World.1 These states differed widely among themselves in terms of history, geography, and political orientation. Some newly independent countries, such as India, pursued a policy of ‘non-alignment’ or ‘neutralism’ with respect to the superpowers, while others, such as South Vietnam, continuously stressed their allegiance to the anti-communist ‘free world’. Despite such differences, however, the countries that made up what the United States termed the ‘underdeveloped areas’ shared important characteristics. These included anti-colonialism and anti-racialism, borne of their recent experiences with European imperialism, and a commitment to economic development, which grew from their high levels of poverty relative to North America and Europe.2 In Washington’s view, the tumultuous process of de-colonialization, and the economic, social, and political backwardness of the new nations, made them vulnerable to communist penetration. As a global power that sought to create and secure an international order hospitable to its interests, the United States saw developments in the Third World as critical to American security. America’s frustrating and costly experience on the Korean peninsula between 1950 and 1953 reinforced Washington’s perception that events in what had once been considered the ‘periphery’ could have dangerous consequences. For the remainder of the Cold War, the United States worked to prevent the communist powers from expanding their influence in the developing world. Helping friendly Third World regimes build the capacity to resist communist thrusts was a key element in America’s containment policy. During the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, assistance to foreign police and paramilitary forces was an important instrument of America’s Cold War statecraft. Historians have examined other aspects of Eisenhower’s security program for the developing world, including foreign aid, propaganda, and covert intelligence operations.3 Kennedy’s approach to defeating communist revolution has been the subject of an equally large body of literature.4 Yet the subject of American assistance to police and paramilitary forces abroad has received relatively little scholarly attention.5

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Introduction

This is not to suggest that the topic has been ignored entirely. However, previous accounts of internal security assistance during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years have a number of important limitations.6 Early work, while providing a useful overview of the Eisenhower and Kennedy initiatives, was restricted by a lack of access to the bulk of official documents on the subject, which have only become available during the past decade, and thus relied heavily on interviews.7 Scholars working more recently, while having access to many more official papers, have focused their attention largely on US activities in Latin America, where US support to anti-communist governments during the Reagan administration generated new scholarly interest in earlier American internal security assistance in the region.8 Finally, researchers on this subject have tended to come from fields other than the history of US foreign relations, such as sociology and political science, and as a result, their work has understandably emphasized theory-building and related social science activities, rather than the construction of a historical understanding of a particular period. Notably absent in the existing literature on American public safety assistance under Eisenhower and Kennedy is a systematic account of internal security assistance to the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in South Vietnam. Aspects of this assistance effort have been touched upon in Vietnam historiography,9 but the subject has been examined only in passing.10 To the extent that historians of the conflict have examined the internal security program, they have generally focused on the tragic consequences of its failure.11 In this, accounts of police and paramilitary assistance to the Diem government parallels the larger Vietnam historiography dealing with Kennedy administration policy. Much of that literature concerns the great ‘what if’, namely, what Peter Busch has correctly described as ‘the essentially unanswerable question of what [Kennedy] might have done in a second term in office12’. Developing a more complete understanding of how Eisenhower and Kennedy used police and paramilitary aid in response to the communist challenge in the developing world requires an assessment of American program in South Vietnam. The reasons are two-fold. First, during the 1955–61 period, Americans continuously stressed the importance of the survival of a non-communist government below the seventeenth parallel. Neither Eisenhower nor Kennedy considered Vietnam to have great intrinsic importance. Rather, in the zero-sum calculus of the Cold War, the loss of Vietnam was seen as a gain for Moscow and its communist allies. Billions of dollars worth of economic and military aid were transferred to the Diem government to bolster its position as a free world outpost in South East Asia. In sum, Americans considered the stakes to be as high in Vietnam as they were anywhere else in the Third World, and considerable resources were committed to its defense. The second reason for considering the American internal security assistance program in Diem’s South Vietnam is the sheer scale of that enterprise. Reflecting the importance of maintaining Diem’s anti-communist government, the South Vietnam program was the single largest of its kind during the 1955–63 period. A fuller understanding of how Eisenhower and Kennedy conceptualized and used

Introduction 3 foreign police assistance thus requires an assessment of the policies and programs undertaken to support the Diem regime. The purpose of this book is to explore official US perceptions, the activities of American civilian and military organizations, and bureaucratic conflict among US advisors in Saigon, and how these factors contributed to shortfalls in Washington’s internal security assistance policy in Vietnam. In filling in this lacuna, it is hoped that this work will contribute to the growing body of literature examining how the US leadership during the middle period of the Cold War perceived the threat of communist subversion abroad, and how Washington sought to combat revolution through non-military means, such as foreign aid, intelligence operations, propaganda, and assistance to foreign police and paramilitary forces.13 Although it is not intended to serve primarily as a work of Vietnam historiography, the book is part of the growing body of literature on pacification and the so-called ‘other war’, that is, the rural development programs, intelligence activities, and military special operations designed to destroy the insurgency’s political base.14 Two issues now before US and allied national security officials make this book particularly timely. First, the so-called ‘global war on terrorism’, launched in response to 11 September 2001 attacks, has included substantial increases in assistance to police and paramilitary forces in Asia, Africa, and the wider Middle East. That assistance is intended to improve the counter-terrorism capabilities of local police and intelligence agencies, and to promote cooperation between those services and Western governments as they work to identify and disrupt terrorist cells.15 Second, the ongoing insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have generated new interest in the role of police and paramilitary forces in defeating guerrillas and promoting internal stability, and to renewed attention to the problem of how best to organize, train and equip internal security forces for these missions.16 Counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan has also helped fuel a broader ongoing debate about ‘nation-building’ (or, more properly, ‘state-building’17) and the merits of attempting to transform foreign polities into models of Western democratic liberalism.18 Given these international developments, it has become increasingly important to understand why policies aimed at strengthening foreign internal security forces can fail to achieve their objectives. As suggested above, this study is explicitly US-focused. Historians of American foreign relations, operating within a sub-field of American history, are entitled to ask American-centred questions intended ‘to elucidate the broader contours of the American national experience’, as Robert J. McMahon has observed.19 With its emphasis on the American policy process and its implementation, this book meets the criteria for pursuing a US-centred approach. As Frederik Logevall has concluded, ‘no apology need be forthcoming from those engaged in the kind of research that is appropriately US-centred’.20 The principal sources for this study are the declassified government papers available at the US National Archives, and at the Eisenhower and Kennedy presidential libraries. Additional primary sources were found in the State Department’s invaluable Foreign Relations of the United States series, and at the Michigan State

4

Introduction

University (MSU) Archives and Historical Collection. Given Britain’s police advisory role in South Vietnam, the importance American policy-makers placed on British police-oriented counter-insurgency in countries like Malaya, and London’s Cold War partnership with Washington, it was also essential to consult the official British papers held at the Public Record Office in Kew. Oral history interviews, memoirs, contemporaneous press accounts, and secondary source monographs and articles served as additional sources. Two limitations should be noted. The first concerns Vietnamese primary sources, which remain largely inaccessible to researchers.21 Material held in government archives in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City might have provided an interesting local perspective on US programs, policies, and personnel. However, given that this book is not strictly speaking an account of US–Vietnamese relations, the author used secondary accounts to provide a Vietnamese perspective on the US internal security program during the 1955–63 period.22 The second limitation is in the area of intelligence. As discussed in the sections of the study dealing with the assistance carried out by the Michigan State University Group (MSUG), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was deeply involved in training and advising South Vietnam’s counter-subversive organizations. Forty years after the events discussed in this study, the CIA’s support to Diem’s internal security apparatus remains shrouded in official secrecy. A number of the documents cited in this work were released to the author under the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and are being used in a scholarly context for the first time. These include documents from the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) and its successor, the Agency for International Development (AID), and the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). However, each of the author’s requests for the release of intelligence agency papers relating to foreign police assistance was denied. For example, the intelligence files connected with Ambassador J. Lawton Collins’ special mission to South Vietnam in 1954–5, held at the Eisenhower library, remained closed, despite being fifty years old.23 Until such papers are made available to researchers, a full account of US internal security support to the Diem regime will not be possible. The book contains seven substantive chapters, five of which explore a series of episodes involving American attempts during the 1955–63 period to refashion South Vietnam’s internal security forces, including the Sûreté (later renamed the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation or VBI), the paramilitary Civil Guard and Self-Defence Corps (SDC), and the Municipal Police. To provide a broader context for the discussion, Chapters 1 and 5 provide top-down assessments of the Eisenhower and Kennedy approaches to combating the spread of communist revolution in the developing world. In particular, these chapters focus on how foreign internal assistance policy was conceptualized by the US leadership, how it changed over time, and how it was implemented by American police and paramilitary advisors on the ground. After examining the origins of the Eisenhower commitment to the Diem regime, Chapter 2 introduces the MSUG and its schemes for re-organizing his

Introduction 5 government’s internal security forces during the earliest phase of American involvement in South Vietnam. Chapters 3 and 4 explore US police and paramilitary reform initiatives during the late 1950s, and the interplay and conflict among American institutions over the purpose and direction of South Vietnam’s internal security agencies. The role of the Civil Guard and SDC in the Strategic Hamlet Program, the centrepiece of the Kennedy administration’s counter-insurgency strategy for South Vietnam, is the focus of Chapter 6. That chapter also considers the participation of Robert Thompson, the British counter-insurgency practitioner and strategist who helped shape Kennedy’s approach to the guerrilla conflict that engulfed Vietnam during the early 1960s. Chapter 7 focuses on efforts by the US government to refashion Diem’s civilian police institutions during the 1961–3 period as the insurgency entered a new period of intensity. As stressed throughout this study, internal factors below the seventeenth parallel, many of which were beyond the ability of a foreign government to alter, played a significant part in the failure of the US public safety campaign. Diem recognized that American military and economic support was essential to South Vietnam’s survival. At the same time, as an ardent nationalist, Diem was determined to prevent the United States from simply taking the place of the French. He exploited American fears about the spread of communism in South East Asia to win US backing, but he never subscribed to, or fully understood, the broader American objective of containing Soviet and Chinese power in the region. However, as difficult an ally as he was, Diem alone was not responsible for Washington’s inability to achieve its internal security assistance objectives in South Vietnam. US perceptions, institutions, and approaches also played an important role, as subsequent chapters will show. During the course of this study, three themes emerge. The most fundamental of these is the American belief in the universal applicability of the US police model, core tenets of which included operational efficiency, unity of command, merit-based promotion, and the utilization of modern technology.24 Central to the police model’s ideology was the premise that policing was fundamentally an apolitical, technical, and problem-solving activity, as emphasized in O.W. Wilson’s Police Administration, the dominant American law enforcement text during the 1950s and 1960s.25 This conception, however, clashed with the revolutionary environment in which many American internal security advisors found themselves. As Tom Marks has concluded, insurgency ‘is about politics, about reshaping the process of who gets what. It is the conscious effort to supplant one political structure with another’.26 These beliefs were an outgrowth of twentieth-century American liberalism, which reached its apogee under Kennedy. Replicating US institutions abroad was seen as key to solving the political, social, and economic problems of post-war Europe, and this strategy was applied with equal enthusiasm to the developing countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. As Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president, concluded in 1976, ‘[w]e sincerely believed that American institutions were transferable’.27 In Vietnam and other

6

Introduction

countries that received American police assistance, advisors held that techniques that worked in the United States would have equally positive effects overseas. American advisors strove to re-organize and train South Vietnam’s internal security forces along US lines. However, this apolitical, managerialist approach ignored the turbulent and unstable reality of Vietnamese political conditions, and was continually frustrated by a wilful American partner who pursued his own agenda for ensuring the survival of his regime. The second theme concerns the collision between the US bureaucracies responsible for carrying out the foreign internal security assistance program in South Vietnam, and the impact of that conflict on US policy. Decision-makers in Washington failed to take into account the near-inevitability of institutional friction between American agencies that entertained competing notions about what was required to secure the Diem regime. In developing this theme, this book makes use of the bureaucratic politics perspective, an analytical framework borrowed from political science that has proved useful in the study of the history of American foreign relations.28 Briefly stated, that perspective holds that no one individual makes policy, and that conflict rather than consensus characterizes the policy-making process.29 The bureaucratic politics approach helps illuminate two long-standing and important challenges police advisors encountered in South Vietnam, namely, the continuing inability of civilian public safety advisors to transform the Civil Guard into a rural police force, and difficulties those advisors had in expanding Vietnam’s police manpower. The third theme concerns the role of universities in American national security policy. Important links between universities and the state were forged during World War II. During the Korean conflict, American universities became permanent partners in the global struggle against communism.30 Policy-makers saw the universities as vital sources of expertise unavailable within the US government, and they turned to institutions of higher education to fill that gap. Universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Johns Hopkins, and the University of California system became major defense contractors. Much of this research and development was in ‘hard’ subjects, including nuclear weapons, air defense, and electronic communications, but during the late 1950s, the US government also became a major supporter of policy-oriented research in the ‘softer’ social sciences.31 From 1955 until 1962, in what must be considered one of the odder episodes of the Cold War, American social scientists and other university personnel assumed responsibility for transforming a foreign government’s badly led, ill-equipped, and poorly trained internal security units. Lacking the skilled manpower to carry out the administration’s 1290-d initiative, the US government’s first sustained program of international police assistance, Eisenhower administration officials contracted with MSU to support Diem’s police and paramilitary forces. The ICA, the foreign aid agency responsible for carrying out a large portion of Eisenhower’s internal security assistance program, eventually grew impatient with the MSUG’s inability to provide adequate counter-subversive training and advice. ICA officials were also disturbed by the fact that the US government had

Introduction 7 engaged a private organization to conduct a sensitive mission more properly carried out by the government itself. The MSUG episode, in addition to demonstrating the limits of contracting out internal security assistance to a university, illustrates the extent of official penetration of American higher education during the high Cold War period. Universities also played a prominent role in the Kennedy administration, particularly as suppliers of knowledge policy-makers considered useful. Increasingly, historians of American foreign relations have come to recognize the role of ideas in the development and implementation of policy, a view that has also emerged within international relations theory, security studies, and related fields.32 The demonstrated utility of ideational factors as interpretative tools, along with the bureaucratic politics perspective, have helped erode the longstanding assumption among historians that policy-making can be understood as an autonomous activity.33 In the case of the Kennedy administration, in-house ‘action intellectuals’ like Walt W. Rostow served as transmission belts for social science theories of modernization and development then in fashion among American political scientists. Those nostrums formed the basis for Kennedy’s counter-insurgency strategy for confronting communist revolution in the Third World, and informed the administration’s program for strengthening police and paramilitary assistance to countries deemed vulnerable to indirect communist aggression. In the administration’s internal security assistance program for South Vietnam, social science, midcentury American liberalism, and a desire to replicate American institutions converged. To the administration’s decision-makers, even the most intractable problems of war, revolution and peace seemed soluble, provided sufficiently rigorous management principles and analytical techniques were applied. Ultimately, the failure of US internal security assistance policy in Vietnam during the Diem era demonstrated the limits of American power. During both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the US leadership was convinced it had found the solution to South Vietnam’s internal security problems. For eight years, Washington labored to create in Vietnam police and paramilitary forces in America’s image, but in the end, Diem’s police and paramilitary forces were impervious to American reforms. As demonstrated again in El Salvador during the 1980s, transforming a weak and unstable regime’s internal security forces in the midst of a revolution proved to be a forbidding challenge.34 Today in Iraq and Afghanistan, as insurgencies rage, the United States is once again frustrated by its inability to refashion police and paramilitary in the American image.35

1

Eisenhower, US foreign internal security assistance and the struggle for the developing world

Introduction Countering Soviet advances in the developing world was an urgent priority for the Eisenhower administration. The primary threat, in the administration’s view, was not military conquest by what Washington called the ‘Sino-Soviet bloc’. Rather, as Allen Dulles, director of central intelligence and the brother of John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, explained at the meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) on 11 April 1957, ‘the most dangerous problem was that of Communist subversion’.1 Early in his administration, Eisenhower initiated a sophisticated counter-subversive campaign aimed at helping friendly governments build the capacity to secure themselves against internal threats identified as communist or communist-supported. Assisting foreign police and paramilitary forces were an important component of Washington’s policy for defending threatened regimes. Although the United States had supported foreign internal security forces in the past, two aspects of the Eisenhower program were new. First, assistance to foreign police and paramilitary forces during the middle and late 1950s was conducted in the context of the Cold War, and was aimed explicitly at countering communist penetration. Second, earlier US assistance had been supplied on a limited and ad hoc basis. Under Eisenhower, supporting foreign police and paramilitary forces became an established part of US national security policy. The foreign internal security assistance program had multiple objectives, and contained elements of foreign aid, military assistance, diplomacy, propaganda, and intelligence. Helping local governments build the capacity for identifying and neutralizing communists and their supporters was a central task, as was developing forces for suppressing strikes, riots, and other violent unrest. Strong internal security forces were also considered important for economic growth and stability and national development. Meeting these goals, Washington hoped, would serve the larger purpose of conserving US national resources for the long struggle against international communism. Washington’s plan for meeting these objectives seemed sound – shore up relatively low-cost indigenous police and paramilitary units to prevent communist advances and in so doing, forestall the commitment of US combat forces. But the

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The struggle for the developing world

program encountered serious bureaucratic and organizational problems as it was being implemented. Critics of the program would later charge that it was a victim of the Eisenhower administration’s neglect and under-funding. Yet neither Eisenhower nor his critics ever asked, let alone answered, the difficult question of how much spending was in fact required to provide for sufficient foreign internal security.

Eisenhower’s New Look policy The death of Josef Stalin in March 1953 offered the promise of a reduction in Cold War tensions. Georgi Malenkov, a member of the collective leadership that assumed power after Stalin, indicated that the Soviet Union would henceforth pursue ‘peaceful coexistence and competition’ with the West, and Moscow launched a peace offensive to convince the world that Moscow had ameliorated the more aggressive and expansionist aspects of its foreign policy.2 Eisenhower eventually concluded that the new Soviet approach was largely rhetorical, and that Moscow remained committed to world domination. However, another event later that year convinced the president that important changes in the East–West relationship were inevitable. On 12 August, the Soviet Union detonated its first hydrogen bomb, and with both superpowers now possessing nuclear weapons, a direct military confrontation between the two powers carried with it the possibility of global annihilation. Competition between East and West would remain the dominant feature of international politics, in Eisenhower’s view, but it would be carried out in the context of what John Lewis Gaddis has termed ‘a framework of co-existence’, in which each side was careful not to provoke the other in ways that could lead to overt war.3 However, the president’s assessment by no means implied an American policy of passivity. The administration was determined to regain the initiative in the Cold War, which they believed had been lost during the Truman administration.4 Despite what in retrospect was clearly a global preponderance of American economic and military strength, the US leadership was haunted by the specter of American vulnerability.5 In Eisenhower’s judgement, the United States would ultimately prevail over international communism, but only after a protracted period of global competition. As the president informed the members of the NSC on 8 December 1955, ‘we are playing this game of trying to outwit the Russians on something like a 40-year basis’.6 Conserving American resources for this long period of competitive co-existence was central to Eisenhower’s national security strategy. In the judgement of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, it was essential to avoid committing US troops to costly and unwinnable ground conflicts like the one the United States had endured recently in Korea. The administration’s New Look security policy, as articulated in October 1953, stated that the United States would employ a range of instruments in a flexible fashion to exploit Soviet weaknesses while conserving American resources.7 The New Look outlined a division of labor between the United States and its international partners.8 General war, it was hoped, would be deterred by US nuclear weapons.

The struggle for the developing world

11

Local conflicts would be the responsibility of America’s allies, supported by US military assistance and economic assistance and backed up by the US nuclear weapons and naval and air power.9 Security agreements among the United States and its allies formed an important part of the New Look policy. Indeed, Eisenhower and Dulles earned a reputation for what was termed ‘pactomania’.10 Alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) were expected to help deter the Soviet Union and its allies, and to reduce US military manpower costs by relying on allies to provide troops to respond to local aggression. Under the New Look strategy, the United States used its own non-military tools to thwart Soviet advances. The Eisenhower approach went beyond simply reacting to Soviet thrusts. Rather, as part of the long-term campaign to undermine Moscow’s stated goal of global domination, the administration policy emphasized the proactive use of foreign aid, covert intelligence activities, and propaganda to keep Moscow off balance.11

The superpowers and the developing world During the Eisenhower presidency, the developing world assumed a new importance in US national security policy. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union had largely ignored what Washington termed the ‘underdeveloped areas’, but after the death of the Soviet leader, Moscow embarked on a campaign to extend its influence in what it had once considered to be peripheral regions.12 Given the potentially suicidal consequences of a direct military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the latter, in Washington’s view, was now pursuing the superpower conflict indirectly through the developing world.13 ‘World communism’ the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) concluded in October 1955, ‘prefers to expand by means other than direct military aggression’.14 The collapse of the French position in Indochina during 1954 reinforced the administration’s perception that communism was on the march in the Third World.15 Moscow’s post-Stalin economic offensive in the developing world added to Washington’s concern. Increased trade, grants, loans, technology and other blandishments helped fuel the administration’s belief that Soviet Union was attempting to lure the newly emerged, post-colonial nations into the communist orbit.16 Decisionmakers like the secretary of state feared that citizens of poor countries might choose the Soviet system in the hopes that it would deliver a better way of life.17 The administration’s sense of alarm about Moscow’s appeal was well founded. As Robert J. McMahon has noted, ‘[m]any Third World leaders and intellectuals both admired and sought to emulate the Soviet developmental model’, which in the course of only a few decades transformed a Eurasian backwater into a global power.18 Eisenhower believed that political instability, poverty, and nationalism in the Third World made it ripe for communist exploitation.19 ‘Nationalism is on the march’, Eisenhower recorded in his diary in January 1953, ‘and world Communism is taking advantage of that spirit of nationalism to cause dissention [sic] in the free world’.20 The Soviet Union aggressively supported ‘liberation’

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movements through what the communists termed ‘active measures’ – propaganda, the creation of front groups, and the manipulation of international forums.21 Moscow could also draw on the resources of the international communist movement. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956 caused many Western communists to leave the party.22 In much of the rest of the world, however, communists remained highly motivated by what Tony Smith has called ‘a millenarian or chiliastic faith, whereby the force of change in the Third World would sweep all before it elsewhere’.23 The Eisenhower administration believed that the Soviet Union and its satellites, together with communist China, formed a single, unified force working to subvert governments friendly to the West.24 The Korean war suggested that the communist powers posed a significant danger when they worked together, and American national security officials spoke frequently of supposedly monolithic ‘Sino-Soviet bloc’. In fact, during the middle and late 1950s, Moscow and Beijing were growing increasingly estranged, driven apart by ideological disputes and differences over tactics in dealing with the West.25 Eisenhower recognized that the relationship was inherently unstable. As the president told the NSC on 18 August 1954, ‘history did seem to indicate that when two dictatorships become too large and powerful, jealousies between them spring up’.26 Yet the administration overestimated the durability of the Sino-Soviet alliance. Washington operated under the assumption that Moscow and Beijing were co-operating closely, and as late as January 1959, Dulles remained convinced that there were ‘no early prospects’ for a rupture between the two communist powers.27

Meeting the subversive challenge The conviction that Moscow and its allies were working to undermine non-communist regimes in the developing world led Washington to develop a program of counter-subversive assistance. The Eisenhower administration never offered an explicit definition of the term ‘subversion’. In the administration’s use of the word, subversion connoted the use of propaganda, front groups, and political agitation to penetrate and then disrupt or suborn government ministries, political parties, the press, trade unions, and education.28 In the administration’s judgement, most Third World governments lacked the knowledge, resources, and training to defend themselves against subversion.29 John Foster Dulles told his Australian counterpart, R.G. Casey in October 1954 that the United States was a neophyte when it came to fighting communist subversion overseas.30 But soon, the United States, faced with a seemingly implacable adversary who operated clandestinely and subversively, began sharpening all of the political, military, psychological, and economic weapons in its Cold War arsenal.

Foreign assistance under Eisenhower Eisenhower regarded foreign aid as a key instrument in the campaign to immunize the developing world against communism. The president directed US foreign

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13

assistance away from Western European countries, which were now expected to be self-sufficient, to newly emerged countries such as Taiwan, Pakistan and South Vietnam.31 Although he was initially sceptical about its utility, the president came to support foreign assistance wholeheartedly after developments such as the founding of the non-aligned movement in 1955 and the 1956 Suez crisis.32 While some scholars have detected a strong moralistic component to Eisenhower’s support for increased foreign aid to the developing world,33 his motivation was in fact more pragmatic. The purpose of foreign aid under Eisenhower was three-fold. First, it was designed to contribute to the stability of non-communist regimes as part of a broader campaign of psychological, political, and economic warfare against the communist bloc.34 Second, the United States hoped foreign assistance would ameliorate misery and want in the developing world, thereby deterring the Soviets from exploiting these countries. As Eisenhower warned the Congress on 21 May 1957, ‘[u]nless these people [of the developing world] can hope for reasonable economic advance, the danger will be acute that their governments will be subverted by communism’.35 Finally, it was hoped foreign aid would help convince the Third World of the superiority of Western political and economic models. ‘[I]t is vital’, Eisenhower told the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee on 23 July 1953, ‘that the people see evidence of improved conditions of living flowing from freedom and independent sovereignty as contrasted to totalitarian methods’.36 Truman had ushered in the modern era of US foreign assistance during his 1949 inaugural address, when he outlined a series of economic and technical assistance measures (later dubbed the ‘Point Four’ programs) that were intended, in his words, to ‘strengthen freedom-loving nations against the dangers of aggression’. The United States, said Truman, was ‘pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques’, which should be made available to help all ‘peace-loving peoples … realize their aspirations for a better life’.37 Congress responded with legislation that gave the president the authority to provide military, technical and economic assistance to nations facing external and internal communist threats.38 In 1951, Congress abolished the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), which had administered the Marshall Plan for post-war European recovery and other foreign aid, and consolidated military aid, economic assistance, and technical cooperation into a single Mutual Security Program (MSP)39. The MSP was overseen by the Mutual Security Agency (MSA), a body under the jurisdiction of the executive office of the president. Military assistance, such as the procurement and delivery of weapons and equipment, and the training of foreign military personnel, was carried out by the Department of Defense (DOD), while the provision of foreign aid became a responsibility of the State Department. In August 1953, Eisenhower created a new independent agency, the Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) to carry out all foreign aid. The administration of military assistance remained a Pentagon responsibility, subject to FOA’s broad policy oversight. Two years later, another major re-organization took place that was intended to give the secretary of state a greater role in directing foreign assistance and the

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Mutual Security Program as a whole. FOA was replaced by the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), a quasi-autonomous unit within the State Department that reported directly to the secretary.40 The ICA director oversaw all economic and military assistance programs, although the Pentagon continued to administer assistance to foreign armed forces.41 ICA administered three broad categories of economic and technical aid: (1) development assistance, which was intended to promote basic economic development abroad; (2) technical cooperation, which provided skills and knowledge in an effort to create what Stephen Browne has termed ‘managerial and institutional capacities’ within developing countries;42 and (3), defence support, the largest aid category overseen by ICA, a specialized form of economic assistance intended to underwrite the cost of a recipient country’s military establishment.43 Although Eisenhower emphasized the importance of the non-military component of the MSP, the military element remained large during the 1950s. In 1957, a typical fiscal year, approximately three-quarters of the $4 billion appropriated for the MSP went to military assistance and defense support.44

‘Banana Wars’, constabularies and nation-building The US leadership concluded early on that countering Soviet advances in the Third World would require the United States to enhance and, in some cases, create police forces and paramilitary units in threatened countries.45 Police and paramilitary forces would have obvious repressive functions, such as identifying, monitoring and apprehending subversive elements. For maintaining internal order, paramilitary forces offer distinct advantages. Trained to control civil disorders, paramilitaries are less likely to use excessive force than are armies, which train to mount more violent combat operations. In addition, notes Grant Wardlaw, using paramilitary forces ‘also [frees] the police from the most serious confrontations with the public, thereby preserving their basically peacekeeping functions’.46 During the middle 1950s, US leaders also saw foreign internal security forces as tools of nation-building, which Robert D. Schulzinger has defined as the establishment of ‘a viable state, with legitimate political authority, a functioning economy, and a growing sense of community among different social classes, ethnic groups, and religions’.47 Modern, professional police forces, in the administration’s formulation, would stabilize friendly regimes and promote economic growth, and in so doing, inoculate the underdeveloped areas against the appeals of communism. As Harold Stassen, the FOA director, told the NSC in November 1954, technical assistance … and internal police forces should be strengthened to bring about better and more stable governments, sounder economic principles and practices and generally strengthen free world ties among these people as insurance against tactics of creeping expansion – internal subversion employed successfully by the enemy in many such areas.48

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The United States had a history of creating and aiding foreign internal security forces stretching back to the American drive for dominance in the hemisphere during the late nineteenth century.49 That assistance typically took place during US military operations, and it often formed part of a broader effort to rebuild institutions destroyed during civil wars and other forms of protracted instability. The first country to receive US internal security assistance was Cuba.50 Immediately after the Spanish–American War, the US army established a nationwide Rural Guard as the island’s law enforcement agency, committed to political neutrality, the rule of law, and the vigorous suppression of crime.51 The Cuban guard served as a template for the other internal security forces the United States created during the so-called ‘Banana Wars’ of the 1915–34 period, when the United States intervened militarily in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua to restore order and protect American commercial interests.52 In each of these cases, the US military – most often the Marine Corps – established indigenous forces commanded by American officers. According to the Small Wars Manual, a compendium of organizational and operational lore distilled from the corps’ experiences during the Banana Wars, the goal of US policy should be to establish ‘efficient and well-trained native force[s]’.53 Known as ‘constabularies’ or ‘gendarmeries’, these units were hybrid police–military organizations responsible for both law enforcement and defence against external aggression. During its Caribbean interventions, the United States attempted to create gendarmeries that were apolitical, professional, and subject to the rule of law. Indigenous security units, according to the Small Wars Manual, should be ‘nonpartisan … [and] patterned along the line of the military forces of the United States, with modifications to suit local conditions’.54 American police institutions served as models, as in the Dominican Republic, where the United States patterned the Guardia Nacional after the Pennsylvania State Mounted Police.55 Nation-building was an important motive underlying American involvement. Modern internal security forces, it was believed, would contribute to stability and order, and would help prevent the emergence of irresponsible and dangerous revolutionary elements, a perennial worry among US statesmen during the first decades of the twentieth century.56 In Haiti and the Dominican Republic, local constabularies were intended to help forge a sense of national identity by breaking down divisive regional and political loyalties.57 The American military encouraged the involvement of gendarmeries in activities such as road-building, the provision of medical care, and the establishment of schools – what counter-insurgency theorists would later term ‘civic action’ – in the expectation that they would help spur national development.58 The problems of corrupt institutions, poverty, and weak central governments had to be addressed, since such conditions could be readily exploited by revolutionaries. As one US marine officer observed in 1926, ‘[l]ife for the peon is sordid and drab. Little wonder that they welcome, with drawn machettes [sic] and loud Vivas, a revolution as a happy diversion and a license to steal’.59 However, attempts to impose US organizational structures and values on America’s new Central American and Caribbean clients sometimes met with stiff

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local resistance, as in Cuba, where judges complained that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ legal procedures such as trial by jury allowed obviously guilty parties to go free. As Merle Curti and Kendall Birr have observed, ‘Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence found rough going in [countries] in which the law was regarded as an oppressor [and] in which collusion and perjury were common practices’.60

Post-war internal security assistance American training of foreign internal security forces reached an unprecedented level during the allied occupation of Germany and Japan following World War II. Reforming local police forces along Western, democratic lines was a particularly important part of nation-building in Japan, where General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), sought to transform the historically repressive Japanese police system as central part of a larger effort to create a democracy there.61 The allies, according to one US advisor, hoped to build ‘a modern and democratic police system oriented to an effective decentralization of the police responsibility in harmony with the constitutional principle of local autonomy’.62 In October 1945, MacArthur disbanded Japan’s political intelligence force, the Special Higher Police, and prohibited police surveillance of lawful political activity.63 In 1946, at MacArthur’s request, police administration experts from California and New York were sent to Japan to survey the police system and make recommendations for decentralizing Japanese forces.64 However, as the Cold War grew in intensity, America’s reformist impulses abated. American military and civilian policy-makers, increasingly concerned about the growth of Soviet power and subversion, were troubled by the weakness of Japanese police forces, and urged their expansion and centralization. George F. Kennan, who served as the director of the State Department’s policy planning staff from 1947–9, noted in his memoirs that in Japan ‘[t]here was no counterintelligence … It was difficult to imagine a setup more favorable and inviting from the standpoint of the prospects for a Communist takeover.’65 Foreshadowing the Eisenhower administration’s campaign to bolster foreign internal security capabilities, Kennan called for the creation of a national police force that could provide security in rural areas, and the establishment of an investigative body modeled on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Members of G-2, SCAP’s Intelligence section, also urged MacArthur to centralize and expand Japanese police organizations.66 With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the reformist agenda for occupied Japan effectively ended.67 Henceforth, the SCAP would stress building the police as a counter-subversive force to root out communists and monitor Japan’s leftist political parties.68 During the Truman administration, the US government assisted a number of other countries Washington considered pivotal in the East–West struggle. As noted by George C. McGhee, an assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs, the United States wanted to convince these states of ‘the dangers of Soviet communism and help them develop internal security forces adequate to protect themselves from communist subversion’.69 In Iran,

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the Imperial Gendarmerie, the country’s rural police, continued to receive American support that had begun during World War II under the direction of H. Norman Schwarzkopf.70 Greece and Turkey received technical assistance for law enforcement and other improvements in public administration.71 In South East Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Burma, according to a report prepared by the MSA in 1952, faced ‘internal communist subversion … designed to rob them of their independence and force them into the service of the Communist world’.72 To defeat such subversion, American assistance was aimed at improving public administration, health care, and agriculture, and building democratic institutions that would allow US friends and allies to maintain their independence. Washington occasionally recruited civilian experts, typically retired American policemen, to advise security forces abroad.73 Under a small contract with the State Department and FOA during the early 1950s, the International Association of Chiefs of Police brought a handful of foreign police officials to the United States every year for instruction in modern police methods.74 The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) advised police forces in Turkey, Thailand, and Indonesia.75 However, until the mid-1950s, the training of foreign internal security forces was largely the responsibility of the US military.76 The American armed forces were a logical choice for supplying such assistance. The federal government was relatively small by pre-Kennedy administration standards. Although the armed forces had shrunk dramatically compared with their World War II size, the military was the only US institution with the financial resources, organization, and manpower to deploy personnel and equipment abroad on any sustained basis. What is more, the American military had long and established relationships with the security forces in a number of countries. The US army had helped establish the Philippines Police Constabulary in 1901, and the American advisory relationship with that force continued throughout the 1940s and 1950s, when the constabulary played a large role in suppressing the Hukbalahap (‘Huk’) rebellion.77 Eisenhower’s more expansive view of the threats posed by communism in the Third World helps explain his heightened interest in developing new approaches for combating the Soviet challenge. Melvyn P. Leffler is correct in stating that the United States under Truman sought ‘to shore up the periphery and counter Soviet probes’.78 Under Truman, that ‘periphery’ was more narrowly defined to include only Iran, Greece, the Philippines and, after 1950, South Korea and Indochina. Under Eisenhower, the periphery was extended to include Latin America, Africa, and the whole of East and South East Asia. During the 1952–61 period, virtually the entire Third World became contested terrain in the global struggle between communism and the free world. Under Truman and his predecessors, US assistance to police and paramilitary forces was conducted under relatively extreme circumstances, where public order was collapsing (e.g. Greece and the Philippines), or where US policy demanded that police organizations be recreated from the ground up (e.g. in occupied Japan).79 During the Eisenhower administration, assistance to foreign internal security forces became a key instrument of American strategy for thwarting

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Soviet designs on the developing world. Washington supplied the assistance in times of relative peace as a prophylactic against subversion, and in times of crises as a response to communist-backed civil wars and insurgencies.80

NSC action 1290-d During the early 1950s, decision-makers in Washington complained routinely that other countries were eager for American help in controlling subversive activities, but that the United States lacked the capability to provide police assistance in any kind of sustained fashion.81 A growing recognition of the importance of maintaining internal security in the developing world, combined with the belief that the US government was ill-equipped to supply appropriate training, led to a high-level review within the Eisenhower national security bureaucracy.82 On 21 December 1954, the president ordered a report on the ‘status and adequacy of the current program to develop constabulary forces to maintain internal security and to destroy the effectiveness of the Communist apparatus in free world countries vulnerable to Communist subversion’.83 Known by its NSC designation, 1290-d, this initiative marked the beginning of the first systematic effort to organize, train and equip local police and other internal security forces to combat communist subversion in the underdeveloped countries. The 1290-d initiative meshed with the tenets of the New Look policy in three ways. First, foreign internal security assistance was intended to drive down the cost of aiding foreign governments, since it was expected that non-military security forces would be less expensive than indigenous conventional military units.84 Second, internal security assistance reflected Washington’s desire to divide the responsibility for waging the Cold War among America’s international partners. Ferreting out communists and maintaining order, in the administration’s view, should be done by friendly regimes themselves, with the United States providing equipment and training.85 Finally, if US foreign internal security policy worked as expected, and communist subversion was contained early, the United States would not be forced to commit American combat forces. NSC action 1290-d sparked a flurry of activity within the US national security bureaucracy. Shortly before the NSC met in December to discuss foreign internal security assistance, the FOA established a small and embryonic police training unit, known as the Civil Police Branch (CPB). Following the NSC’s authorization of 1290-d, the foreign assistance agency enlarged its police assistance group, and renamed it the Civil Police Division (CPD). This bureaucratic elevation gave the division the same organizational status as FOA’s public health, education and public administration divisions.86 The CPD was the first US government organization devoted exclusively to international police training.87 Within the next few months, the CPD was providing, or was preparing to provide, police training to Indonesia (the first recipient of assistance from the newly formed police assistance bureaucracy), Iran, Liberia, South Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.88 However, the NSC’s December 1954 action, in stressing the development of ‘constabulary’ forces, created confusion within the national security bureaucracy.

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1290-d implied that constabularies were the only suitable local forces for maintaining internal security. The president himself seemed enamored with the constabulary concept, believing it to be a lower-cost alternative to using military force to maintain internal security.89 In so doing, Eisenhower overlooked the security role for other non-military forces that the US government was beginning to support in a systematic way, such as the police. By emphasizing just one instrument, the government was in danger of ignoring the range of internal security threats a friend or ally faced, and the need to apply different instruments to meet those threats. The key task, the State Department concluded in January 1955, was to determine what was needed for internal security, ‘whether they be regular armed forces, police, special security forces, or constabulary, or a combination thereof’. In a country threatened with overt insurrection, conventional military units might well be needed to restore public order and state control. On the other hand, police and intelligence agencies would be sufficient to deal with nations faced with subversion and lower levels of violence.90 Such objections to focusing too narrowly on constabularies were persuasive. Within a month the 1290-d initiative widened to embrace the notion that different types of forces would be required if a given country was to be able to defeat internal security threats. Yet it soon became clear to the Eisenhower administration that many countries were less interested in developing police and paramilitary forces for internal defence than they were in creating large conventional military units for defence against external attack.91 During the next two years, American assistance to police and paramilitary forces abroad increased considerably. Broad policy guidance for internal security assistance activities was subject to elaborate staffing procedures. Eisenhower, reflecting his earlier career as a staff officer and senior allied military commander, favored a style of administration that stressed exhaustive reviews of options, thorough analysis, and frequent formal statements of policy. Internal security policy was no exception. Under the three-tiered system of formulation and review, the 1290-d Working Group, an inter-agency body that included representatives from the State Department, ICA, CIA, and the Pentagon, drafted initial guidance. That document was reviewed by the OCB, which would then submit it to the NSC and the president for final approval.92 By the autumn of 1955 the working group had drafted the study mandated by the NSC the previous December. Working group members conducted extensive country-by-country reviews of political conditions, communist threats, and the capabilities of counter-subversive internal security forces. In their report, the authors painted a depressing picture. Many of the 18 countries surveyed had neither the resources nor the will to resist the internal communist threat. According to the working group report, Brazilian authorities were ignoring the country’s large communist party; in Vietnam, police forces were woefully inadequate to meet the subversive threat; and in Syria, a weak legislature and judiciary were hindering anti-communist measures.93 To provide priorities for assistance, the working group divided the countries into four categories. The highest priority was those countries facing what the working group considered a ‘critical’ threat of communist subversion, such as Vietnam and

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Laos. Countries such as Syria and Indonesia were deemed to face a ‘dangerous’ threat. The ‘potentially dangerous’ category included Greece and Iran, while the threat in countries such as Iraq and Korea was considered ‘contained but needs watching’.94 By mid-1956, US police advisors were serving in ten countries overseas, and had trained nearly 12,000 indigenous personnel.95 American advisors worked to improve routine public safety functions such as criminal investigation, traffic control, and police administration. At the same time, CPD technicians advised local forces in more esoteric and political aspects of internal security, such as border control and counter-subversion, which were aimed at identifying, monitoring and neutralizing those elements deemed hostile to the state.96 Local communists, naturally, were of particular concern to American officials, who believed that they were likely to carry out espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Improving a regime’s investigative ability would serve a dual purpose. In countries such as Greece, Turkey, Guatemala and Vietnam, ICA police advisors helped create crime laboratories, establish fingerprint bureaux, and set up modern record-keeping systems. ICA officials touted such improvements as integral to rooting out subversives as well as criminals and other ordinary undesirables.97 The scope and pace of US assistance also grew. New programs were begun, or existing efforts increased, in countries such as Afghanistan, Bolivia, Cambodia, Greece, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Laos, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.98 During the late 1930s, the FBI worked with local authorities to defeat Nazi subversive plots in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, and as the Cold War grew in intensity after 1947, Washington rekindled its wartime relationship with local police, paramilitary and intelligence forces.99 As Henry Holland, the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, testified before Congress on 9 May 1956, the United States was helping local governments establish what he termed ‘specialized organizations … for the specific purpose of combating communist espionage and subversion within their own countries and on a coordinated international basis’.100 Britain and France also participated in this scheme. Such assistance included technical expertise and manpower, both of which were in short supply within the United States. The involvement of US allies also served a broader political purpose for Washington, since it demonstrated that other Western nations were committed to bolstering internal security against Sino-Soviet subversion. Thirdcountry assistance might also defray, at least in some minor way, the costs of police training. By 1956, France and Britain were advising foreign police and paramilitary units, albeit on a small scale. In Vietnam, members of the French Gendarmerie taught courses at the paramilitary Civil Guard officers’ school on topics such as police operations against guerrillas.101 South East Asia was also a focus of British overseas police assistance. In July, British diplomats met the Cambodian commissioner of police in Phnom Penh and offered to train Cambodian police in security intelligence, criminal investigation, police administration, and other areas.102 Foreign Office officials also explored the prospect of using training facilities in Malaya to provide instruction to Vietnamese and

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Laotian police officials.103 By the end of the decade, roughly 400 foreign police officers a year were receiving training in Britain at the Bramshill Police College in Hampshire and at nine regional police training facilities.104 Responsibility for carrying out the enhanced US foreign internal security assistance program was divided among several agencies. The ICA’s Civil Police Division (re-christened the Public Safety Division or PSD in December 1957) increased to 87 people during the 1957 fiscal year, and its budget grew from $10 million to $14 million.105 The PSD was the single largest component of the overall 1290-d program, whose fiscal year 1957 budget totalled $25 million.106 Other federal agencies that carried out activities under the foreign internal security rubric included the Defence Department, the CIA, and the US Information Agency (USIA). The Pentagon’s role was most significant in the training of paramilitary forces in countries like Greece, Iran and the Philippines, which in a typical year accounted for more than 20 percent of the overall US foreign internal security budget.107 Counter-subversive training for police units was the responsibility of the CIA, whose officers operated under ICA, and in the case of Vietnam during the late 1950s, Michigan State University cover.108 The CIA, according to a White House memorandum prepared in February 1959, supplied ‘experts and facilities for the technical portion of counterintelligence training with the aim of producing an investigative service … skilled in identifying subversive activities’.109

Propaganda and psychological operations The $25 million figure also included funds for psychological operations and propaganda, important weapons in Eisenhower’s Cold War arsenal.110 Building the will of populations around the world to resist communism was a key goal of the president, who had declared during his first State of the Union address that ‘[t]he heart of every free nation must be honestly dedicated to the preserving of its own independence and security’.111 American officials complained that while foreign governments were eager for internal security assistance and other American largesse, many lacked sufficient anti-communist zeal and failed to understand the true nature of the threat posed by communist subversion.112 The administration responded with an information campaign to promote a general awareness of the communist threat among the intelligentsia, members of the internal security forces, and the general public in countries such as Cambodia, Greece and Iran.113 In Iraq, USIA commissioned anti-communist books for consumption by local intellectuals, and in Afghanistan, according to a September 1956 OCB report, USIA officials at the American embassy in Kabul employed ‘calculated leaks’ to local officials, presumably to discredit communists and communist propaganda.114 Responsibility for propaganda was divided between USIA, which conducted overt information programs, and the CIA, which carried out covert or ‘black’ psychological operations and disinformation. During the 1954 operation to overthrow the Jacobo Arbenz government in Guatemala, the CIA prepared inflammatory and subversive pamphlets and recorded a series of ‘terror broadcasts’ describing the

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potentially grim future of the country under Arbenz.115 USIA also distributed propaganda aimed at building greater public support for internal security forces. In Vietnam and Laos, USIA personnel supplied posters, pamphlets and other materials. Such support, however, sometimes conflicted with the agency’s broader mission. In Bolivia, USIA refused to drum up support for the regime’s thoroughly unpopular security forces, arguing that doing so would link the information service with the regime’s repressive apparatus, thereby tainting the agency and diminishing its ability to carry out its other activities in the country.116

Weaknesses of the program By the late 1950s, despite Washington’s attempts to revamp the foreign internal security program, administration officials concluded that the United States had failed to stem the tide of communist subversion in the developing world. Beijing’s military advice and material assistance to the Viet Minh forces had been instrumental in the French defeat in Indochina.117 Moscow’s efforts to entice countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America with military assistance, development aid, and visits by Kremlin leaders continued to alarm policymakers.118 As Allen Dulles told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1958, the Soviet Union continued ‘to estrange [the developing world] from the West and to lay the groundwork for growing Soviet influence’.119 The president, however, was not concerned simply with communist subversion, but with all forms of the instability that appeared to be spreading across the Third World. At the 3 December 1958 meeting of the NSC, Eisenhower worried ‘whether free government in this world is going to be able in the future to hold out against ruthless dictatorships’ noting that Soviet achievements ‘obviously have a tremendous appeal for the underdeveloped peoples’.120 Guerrilla conflicts in areas deemed important to American interests fuelled fears that the Soviet Union and its allies were on the ascendancy. In South Vietnam, the US-backed government of Ngo Dinh Diem faced a nascent insurgency. In Cuba, the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, long friendly to American commercial interests, collapsed in the face of a small but determined band of guerrillas, some of whom identified themselves as Marxist-Leninists. And in Algeria, France was waging a bitter campaign against the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), an insurgent movement publicly praised by communists around the world. None of these insurgencies was in fact a creature of Moscow or totally controlled by communists, but they were taking place in a period of heightened international tensions. A string of crises – over the Taiwan Strait, Berlin, and the shooting down of the U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union – while not directly involving the developing world, added to the administration’s fears about the Soviet Union’s growing power and influence. The Soviet launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, in the autumn of 1957 provoked a deep anxiety among the American people about the ability of Eisenhower to lead the nation as it faced the prospect of Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles.121 The over-heated

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language of a Newsweek magazine article captured the mood of much of the country when it reported that ‘the Reds’ appeared to be ‘turning the screws’ around the world.122

The overseas internal security program During the late 1950s, as the United States faced what seemed to be an ever-more ruthless and determined adversary, the Eisenhower administration conducted a series of reviews of the internal security assistance program. With communists appearing to make inroads in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, it was reasonable to re-examine an instrument of containment that the president had hoped would thwart subversion while at the same time conserving American resources. One of those reviews led to a shift in the orientation of the 1290-d program, which was re-christened the Overseas Internal Security Program (OISP) in March 1957. Most of the 1290-d activities continued under the OISP. Agencies gave technical advice, counter-subversive training, support to paramilitaries, and other internalsecurity assistance. There were three changes in emphasis, however. First, the OISP made more explicit the link between internal security and economic growth and development.123 The MSP had been under attack by fiscal conservatives in Congress who derided assistance to foreign countries as nothing more than a ‘giveaway’, and the president was eager to defend the program.124 During the Eisenhower era, Congress cut an average of 20 percent of the annual foreign aid budget submitted by the White House, leading the president to lament in his memoirs that the entire MSP budget in any given year ‘equalled only one-fourth our expenditures for cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, and liquor’.125 Promoting security abroad, the president argued, was not a ‘giveaway’, but a prudent means of helping to ensure American victory in the Cold War.126 The OISP also placed a new stress on better bureaucratic coordination. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles had long complained about the lack of coordination among agencies that provided internal security assistance and the administrative confusion and unnecessary duplication that resulted.127 Under OISP, organizational lines were tidied up, and the roles and functions of the participating bureaucracies – ICA, the State Department, USIA, DOD and the CIA – were made more explicit. Finally, the OISP emphasized the strengthening of foreign legal mechanisms as counter-subversive tools, and Washington supplied more assistance aimed at improving judicial systems, prisons, and counter-subversive legislation.128 This new focus came at a time when some American officials were growing uneasy about US support for repressive regimes.129 Police and paramilitary forces were obvious and visible instruments of repression, and the administration recognized that the United States ran the risk of being tainted by association with such unsavoury elements.130 Although widespread official and public concern about supporting such forces would not emerge in the United States until the early 1970s, it appeared to some influential Americans during the late 1950s that US internal security assistance policy was helping prop up dictators. Some members of

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Congress, such as Senator Wayne Morse, were vocal critics of US support for dictatorial governments, particularly in Latin America.131 The president himself wondered whether such assistance was counter-productive. At a meeting of the NSC on 30 June 1960, Eisenhower told his colleagues that continuing to give American support to dictatorial regimes that failed to reform ‘would be like giving money to a juvenile delinquent to buy a “hot rod” which might kill someone’.132 The ICA officials who carried out the OISP argued that US national security required Washington to work with regimes that sometimes failed to meet American standards of democracy and human rights. In a paper written in June 1957, Albert R. Haney, ICA’s deputy assistant to the director for security affairs, declared that promoting internal security abroad, ‘is a vital, although unspectacular and often thankless, task for the US to assume’, adding that without internal stability, ‘all other political, military, and economic efforts could become meaningless’.133 Nevertheless, in keeping with the shifting mood in Washington, ICA ordered its field personnel to take steps to minimize abuses by local police authorities and ensure that recipient countries enacted legal and judicial safeguards.134 Henceforth, policy dictated that US police advisors should stress policing as a public service profession, promote humane policing techniques such as minimizing the use of force, and improve communications and the supervision of police officers.135 As in Cuba at the beginning of the century, US foreign internal security during the late 1950s advisors advanced what O.W. Wilson, an ICA consultant, termed ‘Anglo-Saxon police concepts and the philosophy of police as a service to the people’.136 Such steps, combined with the continuing US belief that the dangers posed by communist threat in the Third World required strong and sustained countermeasures, including working with brutal and dictatorial governments, appears to have quelled official concerns about supporting the security forces of repressive regimes. Throughout the remainder of the administration, decision-makers continued to stress the importance of assisting police and paramilitary forces abroad and other measures to enhance foreign internal security assistance.137 Despite these measures, criticisms of the foreign police and paramilitary programmes continued. Police assistance officials frequently cited statistics as a way to quantify their program’s achievements. By the end of fiscal year 1958, ICA noted in its annual report, American trainers were advising local forces in 25 countries, and were assisting 504,649 members of police and paramilitary forces.138 Internal security forces, which had been ‘corrupt, repressive, underpaid, subject to political factionalism, too highly militarized, and disliked by the citizenry’, were being transformed. Thanks to US assistance, they had been inculcated with ‘a Western concept of law, order and public service’.139 More grandiosely, ICA also claimed that the mere existence of its public safety programs had sometimes deterred communists from subverting local police and paramilitary organizations.140 However, the internal security program clearly failed to achieve a key objective set out for it by Eisenhower. The president had expected 1290-d and OISP to strengthen foreign police and paramilitary forces, and in so doing, help conserve American financial resources. As the OCB concluded in a review of internal security assistance in March 1957, ‘there is no indication that as a result of

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these expenditures there will be a decline in military expenditures’.141 Nor was their any evidence of savings in subsequent years.142 Throughout the late 1950s, ICA officials themselves described a host of other problems besetting the internal security assistance effort. A PSD report stated the matter bluntly in a report prepared in December 1957. Training efforts in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, and Libya had ‘faltered badly’. Emergency police assistance to flash-points like Lebanon, where Eisenhower would dispatch US troops in July 1958, had disrupted PSD planning and operations and overstretched the organization’s resources.143 Progress was slow in terms of negotiating assistance agreements with other governments, but given that the United States was ‘dealing in one of the most sensitive areas in a government’s activities’, it was ‘only natural that foreign governments are hesitant to accept technical assistance in this field’.144 Officials responsible for planning and carrying out police assistance abroad faced an array of challenges that were probably insurmountable. It was easy for critics to cast blame. Communists appeared to be making gains throughout the developing world, and if internal security assistance was meant to promote stability and counter subversion, had these programmes not therefore failed? Success, on the other hand, was difficult if not impossible to measure. Although ICA tried, it was tricky for the organization to claim that any one US government activity was responsible for forestalling a revolution, coup, subversive plot or other form of unrest. Citing the number of foreign policemen trained was one way to try and measure performance, but as ICA admitted in 1958, ‘[p]rogress in … public safety programs is difficult to measure because of the public-service nature of police work and the impossibility, therefore, of [creating] absolute measurement criteria’.145 The internal security assistance programs also faced a variety of organizational and bureaucratic obstacles, both within and outside ICA. Other agencies, particularly the Pentagon, operated in ways that sometimes worked against the objectives of the OISP. Although Eisenhower repeatedly emphasized the importance of training foreign paramilitary forces for internal security missions, the Pentagon sometimes resisted the spirit if not the letter of administration policy. Throughout the Cold War, the United States devoted more attention to training and equipping military forces than to preparing internal security forces to maintain civil order.146 Enjoying post-World War II prestige (despite the ambiguous outcome of the Korean conflict), the Defense Department had the public and congressional support, and financial resources, to exercise bureaucratic power and autonomy. This was evident in the Pentagon’s training of foreign paramilitaries. During the 1950s, American military commanders, reflecting an organizational ethos that stressed conventional combat operations, saw foreign paramilitary forces as adjuncts to the armed forces. Rather than emphasizing internal security functions, as dictated by 1290-d and OISP, the US military prepared paramilitaries to resist external aggression, equipping them with heavy weapons and training to carry out conventional combat operations.147 The recruitment of qualified and experienced US police trainers would remain a problem into the early 1970s, when Congress eliminated most foreign law

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The struggle for the developing world

enforcement assistance as part of the Vietnam-era uproar over American national security policy. Qualified applicants, who spoke foreign languages well, and were comfortable living in difficult environments, were in short supply. Candidates who met such criteria would likely be in demand within the private sector, which presumably could offer salaries and benefits more attractive than those available in government service. For individuals who were looking to serve more directly in the global struggle against communism, the CIA would have likely been a more attractive organization in which to exercise their skills. In the days before congressional and press investigations of CIA assassinations, coup-plotting, and ‘dirty tricks’, the agency’s officers enjoyed a glamorous reputation as the elite shock troops of America’s Cold War struggle against communism.148 In the words of one CIA officer, ‘[w]e felt we were the first line of defense in the anticommunist crusade … There was a clear and heady sense of mission – a sense of what a huge job this was’.149 The ICA’s institutional culture also contributed to the difficulty of providing the police and paramilitary assistance the president and his top lieutenants expected. ICA was never enthusiastic about planning and carrying out such assistance, preferring instead to focus on economic aid and development. Police work, with its repressive overtones, was simply too unpalatable to ever find a place within the mainstream of the foreign assistance bureaucracy. Byron Engle, the senior PSD official under Eisenhower, and later director of PSD’s successor, the Office of Public Safety, during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations, argued that the ICA leadership had brushed aside the president’s emphasis on foreign police and had failed to give internal security assistance adequate support.150 Ernest Lefever has described the internal security assistance programs during this period as ‘unwanted orphans’ in the US national security bureaucracy.151 During the Kennedy administration, NSC officials criticized the funding for the OISP as inadequate. As Robert W. Komer informed a colleague in April 1962, ICA ran a ‘peanut [police] advisory program’.152 Yet critics of the Eisenhower administration’s police and paramilitary aid program never answered the question of how much budgetary support was enough, and whether recipient countries could hope to absorb the level of training US advisors provided. It was also mistaken to argue that senior officials had neglected these programs. Eisenhower devoted personal attention to internal security assistance, as evidenced by discussions at various NSC meetings, and it was Eisenhower’s OCB that conducted periodic reviews of the relevant programs. Indeed, it was under Eisenhower that the United States created its first formal internal security assistance program. What is more, with his administration facing seemingly perpetual international crises during the late 1950s, it may be unreasonable to expect the president to have devoted more attention to what was after all only one component of Cold War national security policy.

Conclusion For Eisenhower, the weaknesses of many newly independent nations made the developing world an enticing target for the Soviet Union. In the view of US

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policy-makers, the intrinsic value of these countries was less important than the function they served as members of the free world. As noted in NSC 5501, dated 7 January 1955, ‘any further Communist territorial gain would have an unfavorable impact within the free world that might be out of all proportion to the strategic or economic significance of the territory lost’.153 As important as it was for Washington to deny communist gains in the Third World, the administration also believed that US resources had to be conserved for what Eisenhower predicted would be a long Cold War struggle. Rather than deploy costly American combat forces, the administration sought to secure threatened regimes with what it regarded as cheaper means – foreign military assistance, economic aid, and covert action. Support to local police and paramilitary forces formed an important part of the administration’s approach to countering Soviet thrusts in the developing world. As Eisenhower declared at the 11 April NSC meeting, the governments of the newly emerged nations ‘are helpless unless they have the power to maintain internal order and security in their countries’.154 Given the emphasis of the New Look strategy on US fiscal prudence and a division of responsibility among America’s friends and allies, supporting foreign police and paramilitary forces made sense. In practical terms, however, Eisenhower’s goal of helping friendly Third World governments to maintain internal order and security was not easy to achieve. Ensuring public order in any large American city demands large financial resources, well-trained police, and a citizenry committed to reducing crime. Accomplishing the same overseas, in countries as diverse and fractious as Iran, Indonesia, and South Vietnam, posed an even more daunting challenge. This would have been the case even in times of relative stability. The 1290-d initiative and the OISP were carried out during a period in which the United States had identified the developing world as the crucible in which the two competing international systems were struggling for supremacy. Promoting better law enforcement was only part of the mandate for US internal security advisors working abroad. They were also expected to advise local security forces as they ferreted out communists, and to contribute to Washington’s nation-building objectives. Conflicting bureaucratic imperatives, both inside and outside the ICA, added to the challenge. Whether the Eisenhower administration devoted sufficient resources to foreign internal security assistance is a difficult question to answer. The president himself was clearly committed to 1290-d and the OISP. However, as with the Kennedy administration’s overseas police and paramilitary programs, presidential commitment did not translate into institutional support farther down in the national security bureaucracy. Out of an overall annual MSP budget of $4 billion, was $25 million for overseas internal security adequate? The amount seems small, although none of the officials involved in the program complained about a lack of financial resources. More money no doubt would have made some difference, but it is unclear whether recipient countries, or the US government agencies involved, had the capacity to absorb more resources.

2

Shoring up America’s man The origins of police and paramilitary assistance to South Vietnam, 1954–6

Introduction In the aftermath of the 1954 French defeat at Dienbienphu, and the subsequent Geneva agreements that led to the partition of Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration sought to establish an anti-communist, pro-Western bastion below the seventeenth parallel. Leadership of the southern half of the peninsula soon passed from Emperor Bao Dai to Ngo Dinh Diem, a staunch Vietnamese nationalist who had opposed both French colonialism and the communist-dominated Viet Minh. Influential Americans initially questioned Diem’s ability to lead South Vietnam. As one widely read Washington columnist concluded in December 1954, Diem was ‘wholly out of contact with reality’ and thus incapable of dominating the ‘obscene basket of eels’ that was South Vietnamese politics.1 During the following year, however, Diem won full American backing for his regime. Diem, in the fulsome words of Eisenhower and other US officials, was a ‘tough miracle man’ and the ‘savior’ of the Vietnamese nation.2 An ambitious program of American military assistance was intended to defend Diem’s new government against external aggression by the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to the north. American foreign aid was designed to foster the development of South Vietnam’s political, social, and economic institutions. Helping to secure the Diem regime against its internal adversaries was a component of the overall American assistance plan. Under the Eisenhower administration’s 1290-d initiative, Washington supported police and paramilitary forces in Third World countries deemed critical in the global struggle against communism. Having identified South Vietnam as a ‘front-line’ state in the worldwide conflict with Marxism-Leninism, Eisenhower began an internal security assistance program intended to give the Diem government the means to defeat internal subversion. This chapter will examine the first years of American police and paramilitary assistance to South Vietnam, and will explore three themes. These themes help illuminate the sources of the frustration that characterized the American internal security program through the remainder of the Eisenhower administration. First, the US military’s views on, and their assessment of, South Vietnam’s internal security challenges will be discussed. Vietnam historians have explored how

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29

competing views about what was required to secure South Vietnam led to conflict between US military and civilian police advisors during the late 1950s.3 This chapter will build on that work by showing how the ‘American Way of War’ helped shape US military support to Diem’s armed forces in the mid 1950s.4 The second theme is concerned with the early police assistance activities of Michigan State University (MSU). During 1955, MSU forged what John Ernst has termed a ‘fateful alliance’ with the Diem regime.5 That alliance became frayed by the end of the decade. As early as 1956, however, some officials in Washington concluded correctly that a university was an unsuitable institution for assisting a foreign government in the more sensitive aspects of internal security. Finally, this chapter will consider how America’s disregard for Diem’s political environment frustrated US plans for reforming South Vietnam’s internal security forces, That American advisors and policy-makers failed to appreciate the complexities of Vietnamese politics is a recurring theme in Vietnam historiography.6 As this chapter will show, American attempts to re-organize Diem’s internal security forces support the claim that US advisors did not fully appreciate Diem’s difficult political position, both within Vietnam and in his relations with the United States.

Origins of the US commitment For senior national security officials in Washington, US stakes in South East Asia were considerably high. American engagement in Vietnam followed the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula in June 1950. This early American commitment took the form of military and economic support to France, which was fighting to retain its colonial possessions in Indochina. Truman administration officials believed that American aid to the French would serve broader Cold War objectives, such as ensuring the French commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and demonstrating Western resolve against the Soviet Union.7 Between 1950 and 1954, the United States contributed roughly $2.6 billion to the French war effort. The bitter US experience during the Korean War, the fear of having to fight China alone, and an eagerness to avoid what might be perceived as support for French colonialism kept the Eisenhower administration from committing American military forces in support of the French.8 The French defeat, marked dramatically by the destruction of the garrison at Dienbienphu, deeply alarmed the Eisenhower administration, as did the terms of the subsequent armistice and related agreements. Under the truce negotiated between the French High Command and Ho Chi Minh’s People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) at Geneva during the summer of 1954, Vietnam was partitioned at its waist along the seventeenth parallel. French forces were to ‘regroup’ in the south, in the State of Vietnam, which France had granted independence shortly before the Geneva negotiations began. Under the terms of the agreement, the PAVN (often referred to as the Viet Minh) was to regroup north of seventeenth parallel in the DRV. A final declaration, adopted by the Soviet Union, China, Britain, Laos and

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The origins of police and paramilitary assistance to South Vietnam

Cambodia called for nation-wide elections to be held within the next two years to determine the future of a unified Vietnam.9 While both the United States and the State of Vietnam sent observers, neither the Eisenhower administration nor the government of Emperor Bao Dai assented to the Geneva conference’s final declaration. Although the Eisenhower administration agreed to respect the terms of the Geneva accords, Washington saw the agreements as a major setback for American security interests in Asia. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles worried that the Geneva agreements would lead to a Yalta-like recognition of communist conquest, and the outcome of the talks appeared to confirm his fears.10 In the judgement of senior decision-makers in Washington, the Geneva accords provided international recognition for the DRV, a new communist toehold north of the seventeenth parallel supported politically, economically and militarily by China and the Soviet Union. The creation of the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) less than two months after the conclusion of the Geneva negotiations reflected Washington’s concerns about growing communist power in the region.11 By the autumn of 1954 the United States had committed itself to ensuring the survival of an anti-communist regime in the southern half of Vietnam. Washington, however, attached little intrinsic value to Indochina. The significance of the region, in Dulles’ words, was a ‘potential commy [sic] stepping stone’ ripe for exploitation by Chinese communists.12 American success or failure in Vietnam also had important symbolic implications for the administration. For American statesmen, Vietnam was a crucible in which the respective merits of clashing systems – Western democratic capitalism and Sino-Soviet communism – would be tested.13 Thus, the United States believed that a defeat in Vietnam would be a major foreign policy setback and would serve to erode its power and prestige throughout the world.14 France retained a lingering role in South Vietnam, where it hoped to preserve a measure of influence. It soon became apparent, however, that a complete French withdrawal was inevitable.15 At the time of the cease-fire, some 5,000 French military officers were helping to train the Vietnamese National Army (VNA).16 By 1955, US military advisors had assumed this function, and during that year, France withdrew all of its military personnel from Indochina. France’s postGeneva administrative role in South Vietnam was also on the wane during 1954, with the responsibility for these functions being assumed gradually by the Diem government.17 With France gone, South Vietnam would become essentially a unilateral American burden.18 As a first step in helping to secure South Vietnam, Eisenhower sent a letter to Ngo Dinh Diem, whom Bao Dai had appointed prime minister in July 1954. In a letter to Diem delivered in October 1954, the American president pledged to assist the government of Vietnam ‘in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state, capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means’, provided Diem undertook unspecified reforms to ensure that the new regime was responsive to ‘nationalist aspirations of its people’.19 In addition, Eisenhower dispatched General J. Lawton Collins to Saigon. Collins, who was to serve as the

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31

special US representative with the rank of ambassador, was instructed by the president to provide assistance to Diem’s fledgling regime. It was the hope of American officials that they could transform the new South Vietnamese prime minister into what Walter Bedell Smith, undersecretary of state and former director of central intelligence, would term a ‘synthetic strong man’,20 a forceful and capable Asian authoritarian leader in the mould of Syngman Rhee, the president of South Korea.21

Battling the sects Diem’s first task was to overcome an immediate and formidable internal challenge to the viability of his new regime: the continued subversive activities of the Binh Xuyen, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, the so-called sects. South Vietnam in 1954, was ‘an orgy of conspiracy and subversion’, US Senator Mike Mansfield, a self-styled Asia hand, later observed.22 The Binh Xuyen, a politico-criminal enterprise, controlled gambling and other vices, as well as the police forces in Saigon and Cholon, the capital’s twin city.23 The Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, reformist Buddhist sects that served as what Carlyle A. Thayer has termed ‘states within a state’,24 dominated large areas of the countryside in the south, levied taxes on the local population, and maintained their own armed forces.25 The sects also controlled the police forces in several rural provinces. The number of armed sect members was significant. The Cao Dai had 30,000 men under arms, the Hoa Hao had 50,000, and the Binh Xuyen 10,000, according to Lt. General John W. ‘Iron Mike’ O’Daniel, the commander of the US Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Vietnam.26 The power of the sects understandably troubled Diem and his American patrons. As Collins told Dulles on 20 January 1955, the sects, while anti-communist in orientation, ‘have an effective veto power over government action. This power they use to block reforms which might threaten their preferred military, economic and political status’.27 Although the Americans agreed with Diem that the sects posed a threat to his regime, they urged the Vietnamese leader to seek a non-military solution to the sect problem.28 Diem did take a number of steps to co-opt, isolate and divide the sects, such as appointing the leaders of the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao to his cabinet in September 1954. Early in 1955, Diem’s efforts began to pay off. In February, for example, Cao Dai generals, such as Trinh Minh The, and a Hoa Hao military leader, Nguyen Giac Ngo, proclaimed their support for the prime minister, and as a result, some of the sect forces were eventually integrated into the VNA.29 Other sect members, however, proved more resistant to Diem’s blandishments. On March 3, 1955, elements of the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao and Binh Xuyen sects formed a ‘United Front of Nationalist Forces’ to demand Diem’s removal from office. A military confrontation between Diem and the sects was inevitable, and on the night of 28–29 March, Diem ordered the army to move against the Binh Xuyen. After more than a month of fierce fighting, which included the shelling of the presidential palace, VNA succeeded in driving the Binh Xuyen from Saigon. Some $12 million in bribes paid by the US Central Intelligence

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The origins of police and paramilitary assistance to South Vietnam

Agency (CIA) helped persuade many sect cadres to cease their resistance.30 By mid-1956, the army had defeated remnants of the Binh Xuyen army that had fled the capital, and had largely neutralized remaining Cao Dai and Hoa Hao forces in the countryside.31 Diem’s triumph over the most pressing immediate challenge to his regime had a number of important consequences. First, it contributed to his consolidation of power.32 A referendum held in October 1955 deposed Bao Dai and established Diem as head of state; three days later, Diem, proclaiming South Vietnam a republic, named himself president. Equally significant, his victory served to solidify American support and paved the way for a sustained political and material commitment to ensuring the survival of his regime. Diem, as an anti-communist, Catholic, and anti-French nationalist, had enjoyed the backing of a number of influential Americans since the early 1950s, when he spent part of his self-imposed exile from Vietnam living in the United States.33 However, some US officials, including Collins, considered the aloof and authoritarian South Vietnamese leader incapable of meeting the country’s challenges. As late as April 1955, before Diem succeeded in driving the sect forces from the capital, Eisenhower, at Collins’ urging, had considered seeking an alternative to Diem.34 A senior State Department official complained that ‘[w]e are prepared to accept the seemingly ridiculous prospect that this yogi-like mystic could assume the charge he is apparently about to undertake only because the standard set by his predecessors is so low’.35 Diem’s victory over the sects helped overcome American reservations about his leadership. He had demonstrated his ability to defeat a substantial violent challenge to his regime and in so doing reassured his American backers that they had chosen a forceful, decisive national leader.36 French antipathy toward Diem added to his prestige within the Eisenhower administration.37 South Vietnam was not much of a democracy, at least by Western standards. However, the October 1955 referendum had given Diem sufficient legal trappings to allow the Eisenhower administration to claim credibly that it was supporting a reasonably representative government.38 Giving South Vietnam the capability to survive on its own, and buying time for the United States to shore up other friendly regimes in the region, were deemed essential by Eisenhower policy-makers. But before Diem’s triumph over the sects, it was by no means certain that he would serve as America’s chosen figure for leading Vietnam into a prosperous, stable and secure future. After the victory, it seemed clear to the Eisenhower administration that Diem was the right man to defend the interests of the ‘free world’ in the Cold War’s South East Asian theatre. By 1956, American journalists had dubbed Diem ‘the mandarin in the sharkskin suit who’s upsetting the Red timetable’.39 More broadly, it appeared to the Americans that there was simply no credible alternative to Diem. During the spring of 1955, the Eisenhower administration considered Phan Huy Quat, an ardent nationalist who had served as minister for national defense in the Bao Dai regime, as a possible successor to Diem. Ultimately, however, the Eisenhower administration stuck with Diem. In Dulles’s words, Diem had a ‘better chance of

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33

rallying and holding nationalist sentiment than most of the Vietnamese who now seem to be on the scene, or in the wings’.40

Shoring up America’s man Although now anointed as America’s mandarin in Indochina, Diem faced a daunting array of external and internal challenges to his regime. Given Washington’s commitment to ensuring the survival of a pro-Western, anti-communist regime in the South, Diem’s problems would become America’s burden as well. With the sects largely neutralized, the most obvious threat was from the communist North Vietnam, a well-armed adversary committed to the re-unification of North and South under Hanoi’s leadership. Diem also confronted additional internal enemies. Throughout the countryside, large numbers of Viet Minh who had remained behind after the post-Geneva repatriation of most of their comrades to the DRV, posed a nascent threat to the regime. ‘What stayed behind’, in Bernard B. Fall’s words, ‘was an elite guerrilla cadre force’.41 In Washington, the National Security Council (NSC) estimated in December 1955 that as many as 10,000 Viet Minh had entrenched themselves in rural areas.42 Founded in 1941 as a broad nationalist force to combat Japanese and French colonialism, the Viet Minh was not exclusively communist, although Marxist-Leninists dominated the organization’s leadership.43 Following the partition of Vietnam, the Viet Minh, on Hanoi’s instructions, carried out agitation and propaganda designed to pressure the Diem regime to agree to hold the elections mandated by the Geneva accords.44 The Diem government also faced the problem of resettling as many as 1,000,000 indigent refugees from the north, most of whom, like Diem, were Catholic. To American observers, these challenges seemed to be overwhelming the Diem regime. The South Vietnamese government, according to a gloomy US intelligence estimate, was failing to meet its basic responsibilities to the Vietnamese people, such as ‘maintaining domestic order, performing the normal functions of civil administration … and overcoming long-standing problems such as inefficiency and corruption’.45 While recognizing that the Diem regime faced formidable political, social, and economic woes, Eisenhower administration officials concluded that the country’s internal security was the most pressing demand. The NSC, during a 22 October 1954 meeting, approved what it called a ‘crash program designed to sustain the Diem government and establish security’ in South Vietnam.46 Washington’s initial focus was on bolstering the roughly 145,000-man Vietnamese army, a rag-tag collection of ill-trained, poorly equipped soldiers that lacked any real combat capabilities. Eisenhower and Dulles conceived of the Vietnamese army as a small, low-cost, police-like military force whose primary mission would be ensuring public safety and security. As Dulles commented during a NSC meeting on 7 April 1955, the Vietnamese army had been designed by the French ‘precisely for the purpose of maintaining internal security and public order’.47 While accepting that the VNA might one day serve as ‘a small blocking force of “couverture” in the event of

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The origins of police and paramilitary assistance to South Vietnam

aggression’ by North Vietnam, Douglas MacArthur II, the counsellor of the Department of State, insisted the army’s principal mission was to promote stability below the seventeenth parallel.48 External security would be the responsibility of the United States and its SEATO allies.49 The Department of Defense (DOD) held a different view about what was required of South Vietnam’s armed forces. Pentagon officials proposed spending more than $500 million a year to develop a modern, ten-division offensive Vietnamese force capable of defeating overt, external aggression.50 In the judgement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the MAAG, South Vietnam needed a sophisticated, US-style force that could offer serious resistance to any invasion across the seventeenth parallel and contribute to SEATO’s regional defense objectives. 51 For O’Daniel, such assistance would provide an additional benefit for the United States. South Vietnam, in his view, would serve as a laboratory in which to test anti-communist warfare techniques that could be applied elsewhere – including, he remarked cryptically, within the United States itself.52 Senior US military officers did not ignore South Vietnam’s internal security completely. General Samuel T. ‘Hanging Sam’ Williams, who succeeded O’Daniel as MAAG commander in October 1955, told Diem that the Viet Minh ‘must be destroyed like vermin’.53 Williams was convinced that the communist guerrillas could be defeated as they had been in Greece, the Philippines, Korea and Iran.54 But in the view of senior US military officials, the most difficult and pressing challenge was to create a modern conventional army of divisional units and supporting forces. At most, the VNA’s internal security role would be ‘lesserincluded’. That is, the US military held that forces capable of external defense were by definition capable of providing for Vietnam’s internal security.55 As Williams explained in an interview after his retirement, he saw his primary responsibility as preparing Vietnamese forces ‘to repel any invasion coming down from the Communist North’.56 Little if any specialized training would be devoted to unconventional or police-like missions.57 During the middle to late 1950s, the MAAG would orient the Vietnamese army toward conventional military operations. A force of 150,000 troops, initially organized into four heavy divisions (designed to hold off the invading Chinese or North Vietnamese forces until help from SEATO countries arrived) and six light divisions (intended to conduct pacification operations in the countryside) would be transformed to look and operate more like standard US army divisions of the period. Diem, the Vietnamese general staff, and some US civilian officials in Saigon objected to the MAAG’s attempt to create a ‘mirror image’ of US army divisions, arguing that more flexible units were required to meet the real threat to South Vietnam – namely, communist resistance to the new South Vietnamese government. By the end of the decade, the MAAG had succeeded in eliminating the lighter forces and creating seven general-purpose divisions with common equipment, doctrine and training.58 The MAAG’s emphasis on conventional military forces, training, and operations was typical of the US military during this period. Products of World War II and the Korean conflict, MAAG officers subscribed to what Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr. has

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called the ‘Army Concept’, that is, an approach that emphasized mid-intensity, conventional warfare and the lavish application of firepower.59 Operations by guerrillas, to the extent senior US officers considered them at all, were seen not as integral components of protracted revolutionary struggles, as they were by later counterinsurgency theorists. Rather, irregular forces were viewed as auxiliaries that would be used to conduct sabotage, raids and other actions in support of larger conventional operations.60 In the case of South Vietnam, Williams saw the Viet Minh as Hanoi’s diversionary tool designed to distract the VNA from preparing itself to resist overt aggression. The goal of the communist leadership in Hanoi, the MAAG chief declared on 28 December 1955, was to ‘pull large military forces in to the South and West so that they will not be trained and be in proper position to fight against an invasion from the North’.61 Influential American officers who operated outside of the mainstream of the US military, such as Edward Lansdale, also subscribed to the MAAG’s assessment of the communist threat. Lansdale, an Air Force colonel seconded to the CIA in Saigon, had a flamboyant past. During the campaign against the Huk insurgency in the Philippines during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the former advertising executive served as a psychological warfare specialist and advisor to Ramon Magsaysay, the secretary of defense. During the Kennedy administration, Lansdale would enjoy a reputation as America’s foremost counter-insurgency practitioner.62 In his memoirs, however, Lansdale revealed himself as an essentially conventional warrior, at least with respect to South Vietnam in the 1950s. Lansdale blasted those ‘armchair critics’ who argued against preparing the Vietnamese for conventional war. ‘A formal invasion could not be ruled out as a possibility by those who would be responsible for meeting it’, he wrote.63 For a number of civilian officials within the Eisenhower administration, South Vietnam’s security required more than simply creating American-style armed forces. The administration’s 1290-d initiative had identified indigenous police forces as important tools for defeating subversive threats to American friends and allies. In South Vietnam, creating a nation-wide police system was of ‘vital importance … [and] the key [to solving] other civilian and military problems’, according to G. Frederick Reinhardt, who became US ambassador to Saigon in April 1955.64 Herbert C. Hoover, the undersecretary of state, was even more emphatic, declaring at a meeting of the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) on 21 October 1955 that ‘the Civil Police problem in Vietnam was a matter of most urgent priority’.65

Michigan State University and South Vietnam The groundwork for the US program to bolster Diem’s non-military internal security organizations was laid in the autumn of 1954. An advisory team from Michigan State College sent under the auspices of the Foreign Operations Administration (FOA), spent a month assessing South Vietnam’s public administration capabilities, including its police and paramilitary forces. Establishing a prosperous, stable, and secure democratic government, the team concluded,

36 The origins of police and paramilitary assistance to South Vietnam would require large infusions of aid from the United States, and a wide-ranging program of technical assistance to upgrade public administration, the police, public information, and the economy and public finance.66 Washington and Diem agreed, although under the terms of contracts negotiated with Saigon and the FOA, Michigan State College (soon to be renamed Michigan State University, or MSU) would not provide public information or economics-related advice or training, since the US government believed it had adequate personnel on the ground in Vietnam to give such support.67 Instead, MSU decided to concentrate its efforts on three tasks: 1) creating an institute to train civil servants; 2) providing consulting services to national and local government; and 3) training police and paramilitary forces. Between 1955 and 1962, when Diem, the university, and the US government ended their relationship, MSU would receive a total of $5.3 million.68 During the Eisenhower administration, the MSUG project would be the US government’s single largest international police training program.69 Turning to an American university to provide police and paramilitary assistance was an understandable step both for Diem and the US government. Diem was familiar with MSU and its faculty, having served as a consultant to the university’s Governmental Research Bureau during his exile from Vietnam in the early 1950s. While in Michigan, Diem forged a close relationship with Wesley Fishel, a Michigan State political scientist who was to become one of the South Vietnamese leader’s most ardent academic defenders. In May 1955, Diem formally asked the FOA to enter into a contract with the university, and the agency did so the following October. Using MSU also made sense to policy-makers in Washington. The Eisenhower administration’s 1290-d program was in its early stages, and recruiting skilled and available police personnel for overseas service was a continuing challenge for FOA.70 Purdue, the University of Southern California, Northwestern, and other universities were already involved in the small-scale training programs for foreign police.71 MSU, with ongoing technical assistance programs in Colombia and Okinawa, had earned a reputation as an institution capable of conducting overseas training operations.72 Hiring an institution like MSU, with its well-regarded police and public administration faculty, appeared to be a reasonable way to address the government’s police assistance shortfall. The university’s president, John A. Hannah, was well known in Washington, having served as assistant secretary of defense for manpower and personnel during the first Eisenhower administration. Hannah saw American higher education as a key instrument in America’s Cold War arsenal.73 ‘[I]f Michigan State College can perform a service that will advance the long-term interests of the United States”, Hannah told Collins in December 1954, “we will do everything we can to render such service’.74 Indeed, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Michigan State assistance to foreign police forces would extend beyond Vietnam to include the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan.75 Although US universities during the 1950s and 1960s conducted academic and policy-oriented research on what would later be termed ‘counter-insurgency’, and academics throughout this period served as consultants to national security agencies, MSU’s contract marked something of a milestone in

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the history of American higher education. For the first time, a university had committed itself to a long-term effort designed to improve the capabilities of a foreign government’s internal security forces. The opportunity to work in the developing world on government-related projects also appealed to a certain type of ambitious, empire-building academic. Such assignments, noted two former MSU advisors, were attractive to university scholars ‘with imperial designs – entrepreneurs and promoters to who[m] expansion is in itself a good thing’.76 A more important motivating factor was the vision articulated by Hannah, namely, that academics could play a part in defending America’s Cold War interests. Members of the Michigan State University Group (MSUG), as the institution’s Vietnam assistance program was known, shared the Eisenhower administration’s belief that America’s global position hinged on the success of the Diem regime. To be sure, the problems confronting the Diem government were acute. However, earlier US success in creating relatively stable, anti-communist regimes in Iran, Greece and the Philippines gave policy-makers and the university advisors hope that similar results could be achieved in South Vietnam.77

Internal security forces: the French legacy Michigan State advisors, and the Eisenhower administration, were both aware that military defenses alone were not sufficient to ensure the survival of the bastion the United States was erecting under Diem. The United States would also have to engage in nation-building. American technical and economic assistance, American officials hoped, would ultimately help the new and fragile republic in Vietnam to develop its own capacity for long-term survival.78 R.B. Smith described such an approach as the ‘American model’ of national development, which stressed the ‘establishment of a central government capable of modernizing itself to the point where its own administration and security apparatus could control the country effectively at all levels’.79 Internal security forces became a key component of the US nation-building strategy in South Vietnam. It quickly became clear to the Americans that the country’s civilian security agencies were woefully inadequate. Police serve as visible signs of a state’s presence and authority, but outside of Vietnam’s larger cities, police were non-existent. In effect, the government in Saigon offered no public safety protection to the vast majority of Vietnam’s inhabitants. Nor were internal security organizations capable of detecting and rooting out members of subversive groups such as the Viet Minh. Absent an effective police and paramilitary apparatus, the Vietnamese army was compelled to maintain security in the countryside. Furthermore, this lack of effective internal security organs obstructed other significant nation-building activities. As an ICA official lamented in October 1956, [i]t was useless to talk about other contributions through a Public Administration Program … unless something could be done to improve the internal security situation. Technicians … of all specialities, such as public

38

The origins of police and paramilitary assistance to South Vietnam health, education, and engineering, could not even go to the areas where their services were needed. The entire [assistance] program required for its success a restoration of law and order.80

Much of the blame for the poor condition of Vietnam’s civilian security forces could be traced to the French imperial legacy. During the colonial period, the French had established a variety of security forces throughout their possessions in Indochina. Although those forces were expected to contribute to the French goal of ‘uplifting’ indigenous people (la mission civilatrice), their first priority was in fact suppressing Vietnamese nationalism.81 Colonial security organizations fell into two categories: civilian police, and paramilitary units. The first was made up of the Gendarmerie, which operated throughout Indochina, had responsibility for maintaining order in bigger towns, and its duties included the suppression of vice, traffic control, and the supervision of markets.82 The other important civilian force was the Sûreté, which, like the Gendarmerie operated throughout French Indochina. Although it had criminal investigative functions, the Sûreté existed primarily to help France maintain political control in Indochina.83 Specifically, the Sûreté, like the political police operated by other colonial powers at the time, focused on the containment and destruction of nationalist movements, which grew in strength before and after the First World War. During a wave of anti-French terrorism in 1913, the Sûreté waged a campaign of propaganda and other counter-subversive measures designed to thwart Vietnamese nationalist groups.84 The anti-nationalist thrust of the Sûreté continued into the late 1930s, when it attempted to restrict the activities of the Hoa Hao sect by exiling and otherwise harassing its leaders.85 The second category of French colonial security forces was paramilitary: the Garde Urbaine, the Garde Indigène de l’Indochine, and the Garde Civile de Cochinchine. Trained in drill and combat, and garrisoned at strategic points, they existed to quell riots and armed uprisings and served as an auxiliary military force.86 These units responded to political unrest with overwhelming displays of quasi-military force. In 1931, for example, Garde units, overwhelmed by ‘poor people’s hunger marches’ organized by the Communist Party, used aeroplanes to strafe peasant demonstrators.87 The colonial legacy had two major consequences for Diem’s internal security forces, and for the Americans who sought to transform them. First, as Collins observed upon arriving in Saigon in 1954, French influence ‘pervaded every organ of the government.’88 American decision-makers were eager to extirpate the French presence in Indochina, and substitute a US model of post-colonial development.89 Colonialism had left a crippling residue within Vietnam’s police forces. As was the case with all of the public institutions established by the French, the Vietnamese employed in the civil police forces had been trained to serve as mere fonctionnaires with no individual initiative or decision-making responsibilities.90 The risk-adverse, clerk-like mentalité fonctionnaire stressed bureaucratic routine and procedure, such as the preparation of papers to be signed by the French nationals in charge.91 Leadership, even down to the patrol level, was exercised by

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French officers.92 As a result, relatively few if any Vietnamese were experienced or trained in modern police procedures.93 The second consequence of French colonialism for South Vietnam’s internal security was the absence of professional police in the hamlets and villages where most of the Vietnamese population lived. Despite French claims that it was ‘uplifting’ Indochina, colonial authorities made no effort to extend the benefits of civilian policing into the countryside. Villagers were responsible for their own security. Typically, a handful of unarmed, unpaid residents, operating under the supervision of a local official, would serve as glorified night-watchmen.94 There was no impartial representative of the state to whom aggrieved peasants could turn for redress. This criminal justice shortfall fuelled the growth of sects and secret societies, which offered the protection that might have been provided by a police force.95 After the war against the Viet Minh began in December 1946, the French did attempt to organize local militias. However, these self-defense forces were poorly trained and equipped – some members had nothing but cutlasses and iron spikes to defend themselves – and received little support from French troops. Not surprisingly, few villagers were willing to join these militias, which were expected to confront disciplined and well-armed guerrillas.96

The US re-organization plan Diem inherited a motley collection of poorly organized, badly trained and illequipped internal security forces when he assumed power in 1954. As of early 1955, five internal security organizations were in existence: ●

●

●

●

●

The Sûreté (Cong An), a 3,000-man force with responsibility for crime detection and fighting sabotage, counterfeiting and smuggling. In the eyes of American officials, this organization was analogous to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which combined law enforcement and counter-subversive functions. The municipal police (Canh Sat), which conducted routine public safety activities, such as patrolling, traffic control and the guarding of public buildings. The Saigon prefectoral force, the country’s largest, totalled more than 5,000 men. The civil guard (Bao An), a paramilitary body that operated as an adjunct to the VNA. Its 44,000 men patrolled, guarded bridges, and manned guard posts along main lines of communications in areas that the army had swept clear of Viet Minh guerrillas. Diem established the Civil Guard through an April 1955 decree that combined what the US embassy termed a ‘motley army’ of various provincial, regional and private forces.97 Village guards (Tu Ve Huong Thon), the ‘self-help’ local security organizations that were traditional fixtures in rural Vietnamese life. The Gendarmerie (Hien Binh), a relatively well-trained 753-man force. Unlike its French colonial predecessor, the Gendarmerie was not a generalpurpose internal security force, but a specialized police organization with

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The origins of police and paramilitary assistance to South Vietnam responsibility only for traffic accident reporting and investigations concerning military personnel.98

While US officials recognized that these forces would have to be retrained and properly equipped, the re-organization of Diem’s internal security forces was the most pressing priority for the Americans. The proliferation of police and paramilitary agencies and the diffusion of responsibility and authority troubled the American advisors. A US foreign assistance official in Vietnam described the country’s bewildering assortment of policing agencies: After we thought that we knew what were the principal agencies, we would hear about some new one such as a personal bodyguard for the president, or a police force for the control of one of the minority elements like the Chinese population, or a formerly unheard of element of the police operating in the port area.99 Equally troubling to the Americans was the fact that no single individual in the Diem government had overall responsibility and authority for the internal security forces. Some organizations, like the Sûreté , were under the control of the interior minister, while others, like the municipal police, were under local control. In MSUG’s judgement, this lack of strong central direction led to multiple and competing chains of command, political interference, and a lack of proper supervision and discipline.100 During August 1955, USOM and Reinhardt agreed to a modest consolidation plan put forward by the MSUG police advisors. Under the proposal, Vietnam’s internal security organs would be centralized under a single government agency, the Ministry of the Interior. The plan also attempted to map out the roles and missions of these organizations, whose responsibilities heretofore had been overlapping and ill-defined. The Sûreté would have responsibility for counterintelligence and counter-espionage activities, criminal investigations, and the enforcement of counterfeiting, narcotics, alcohol and immigration laws.101 The Civil Guard would function as the country’s police force outside of large cities. In addition to routine law enforcement, the Civil Guard would also be responsible for counter-subversive operations, except in those areas where Viet Minh strength required the use of the Vietnamese army to suppress their activities.102 The municipal police would provide law enforcement in Vietnam’s largest cities. Under the consolidation plan, the Gendarmerie was to be disbanded on the grounds that civilian agencies could perform its functions adequately. Traditional village guards would be permitted to operate. However, they were to be seen as nothing more than an adjunct to the Civil Guard, which would supervise and co-ordinate the activities of the rural forces.103 Diem was not unsympathetic to the American call for a strengthened internal security establishment. Although the Vietnamese leader was concerned primarily with securing American help in building his army, he also accepted American arguments that other steps were needed to strengthen security in rural areas.

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Diem’s April 1955 decree that created the Civil Guard included the provision of law and order in the countryside as one of the organization’s principle missions.104 However, Diem refused to centralize Vietnam’s police and paramilitary authority under the Ministry of the Interior, thereby rejecting an important feature of the US proposal.105 Instead, Diem was eager to place them under his direct control, and in November 1955, he transferred the Civil Guard, the country’s largest police organization, from the Interior Ministry to the Office of the Presidency.106 He also rejected the second thrust of the American re-organization plan, which sought to reduce the number of internal security agencies. Diem refused to eliminate any internal security organizations, including the tiny and redundant Gendarmerie, which would survive years of US effort to abolish it and would ultimately outlive Diem himself.107 To the annoyance of the Americans, Diem expanded the force, which by December 1956 would grow from 753 to 1,300 men.108 While eager for US material assistance, Diem was far less enthusiastic about accepting American guidance on an issue as politically delicate as the organization of South Vietnam’s internal security apparatus. The South Vietnamese president, the OCB observed in December 1955, ‘has shown himself in some cases reluctant to take the accompanying US advice and may be expected to press for programs of his own devising’.109 That characterization neatly describes Diem’s pattern of behaviour with his American police advisors. Diem was acutely aware of his regime’s utter dependency on American largesse. During the late 1950s, the United States supplied roughly 60 percent of all Vietnamese government revenue, and he was well aware that South Vietnam’s survival hinged on Washington’s continuous infusion of economic and military assistance.110 Given this dependence, it was impossible for Diem to completely dismiss American guidance. Instead, the South Vietnamese leader typically presented the Americans with his own plans for enhancing the country’s internal security. In December 1955, Diem outlined for the Americans a new program for security in the countryside, a greatly enhanced rural militia to replace the weak village militias that had long been a feature of Vietnamese life. The South Vietnamese leader was convinced that the Viet Minh were embarked on a new campaign of sabotage, propaganda and terrorism, and as he informed Williams on 28 December 1955, he planned to counter-attack by stepping up operations against what he termed ‘organized dissidents’.111 Although he overstated the level of violence employed by the communists, Diem was correct in assessment of the communist threat in the countryside. During late 1955 and into the spring of 1956, party members formed armed units to resist government forces, worked to disrupt economic links between the hinterlands and Saigon, and infiltrated army and internal security units.112 The army and other security forces, in the president’s judgement, were incapable of combating the Viet Minh activities everywhere in the countryside, so it would be necessary to create and arm ten-man militias in each of Vietnam’s 6,000 villages and hamlets.113 Under Diem’s plan, the militia, soon named the Self-Defense Corps (SDC), was meant to be less sophisticated than either the army or the Civil Guard. Villagers would serve part-time, although they would be on call twenty-four hours a

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day. Weapons were to be issued before members went on guard or patrol duty, and returned to the village administrative office at the end of each watch. Militiamen were not issued military uniforms, but instead wore the traditional black pyjamas of the Vietnamese peasantry.114 The SDC’s strength was intended to be in its near-universal rural presence and in its members intimate knowledge of their surroundings. As Diem told Williams, the militia would thus be more able than the army or the Civil Guard to identify the Viet Minh and monitor their activities.115 Establishing a corps throughout the countryside was also part of Diem’s broader political agenda for South Vietnam. Scholars of the Vietnam conflict have frequently criticized Diem for failing to address the political, social, and economic conditions that strengthened the opposition in the countryside, and for his supposed unwillingness to seek out the ‘hearts and minds’ of the rural population.116 As Bernard B. Fall observed in 1955, the South Vietnamese premier ‘neither knows nor trusts the masses and does not know how to use them’.117 Diem’s plans for the SDC suggest that such characterizations are too narrow. The Vietnamese president was acutely aware of the need to mobilize the Vietnamese peasantry to fight communism and to support the Saigon regime. The new militia was one of Diem’s instruments for achieving that goal. He was determined to go beyond simply arming rural dwellers; he also hoped to create a popular force that would participate vigorously in the regime’s anti-communist campaigns.118 The SDC would carry out political work in the countryside, serving as a transmission belt for the Diem regime’s political program. The SDC, according to a Vietnamese government publication issued in 1961, was composed of ‘exemplary rural cadres with adequate military and political abilities to provide guidance to the neighboring people in the establishment of a new society on the basis of justice, fraternity and philanthropy’.119 To the American police advisors, the Diem proposal represented a clear step backwards, since instead of consolidating existing forces it created new ones.120 American embassy officials in Saigon assented to the Diem concept, albeit grudgingly. The United States agreed to allocate $6.2 million to support a 60,000man corps, but Reinhardt insisted that the aid was temporary.121 Once Vietnam got back on its feet economically, and the Civil Guard was organized, trained and equipped to the point where it could maintain rural law and order, the United States government planned to end its assistance to the SDC.122 During the pre1957 period, most of US assistance would consist of bankrolling the SDC by underwriting its payroll, and providing a small number of old weapons.123 Technically, the SDC was part of the South Vietnamese armed forces. American financial support would come not from the 1290-d program’s $5.7 million annual budget for Vietnam, but from the US Defense Department’s military assistance program.124 Nevertheless, the MSUG would be responsible for training the SDC until 1957, when a dispute between USOM and the MAAG over the militia’s future led the training program’s transfer to the military. Despite their reticence about Diem’s plan, US officials later promoted a series of internal security measures that reflected key elements of his original SDC concept. Village self-defense was to be an important component of the Strategic

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Hamlet Program, the centrepiece of President John F. Kennedy’s rural pacification effort. During the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson the notion of employing SDC as a force for political indoctrination re-emerged with the creation of the Revolutionary Development Cadre, which were designed to promulgate anticommunist ideology in the countryside.125

Nationalism, politics and US aid A former MSUG chief advisor observed in 1966 that ‘some fields are too sensitive or too close to the power centers within government to permit successful university technical assistance activities’.126 Yet there is little evidence the Americans did much beyond simply acknowledging that such sensitivities existed. As with Chiang Kai-shek during and after the Second World War, American officials were frequently appalled by the Byzantine nature of Diem’s regime, and continuously frustrated by the South Vietnamese president’s refusal to follow American guidance.127 Diem’s American advisors often simply assumed that they understood local conditions better than the Vietnamese did. Diem was an authoritarian leader and an heir to the Vietnamese mandarin tradition often saw American advice, no matter how well conceived, as impinging on his prerogatives as the country’s paramount national figure.128 Vietnam, Diem told his MSUG advisors in 1959, ‘could not be expected to be developed in the same way and to the same degree that the United States was developed’.129 Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother and confidante, had their own notions about what should be done to strengthen the regime’s political control over the country.130 Authoritarian leaders typically worked to prevent the concentration of power in hands other than their own, and they encouraged the proliferation of security agencies in the expectation that competition among them will keep them politically weak.131 Under Diem, the number of separate and competing secret intelligence agencies grew to ten, to include the euphemistically named Service des Études Politiques, Économiques et Sociales (SEPES), a covert information collection agency.132 It is not surprising, then, that Diem would look unfavorably on an American plan that would have centralized the nation’s repressive organizations under the interior minister, who might be tempted to employ his new found strength to grab for additional power. Finally, Diem’s nationalist sensibilities may have played a role in his decision to reject the American re-organization proposal. Having triumphed over the French, Diem was eager to avoid the re-imposition of anything that smacked of colonial control. Although US public safety advisors recognized that the police had served as what one ICA consultant termed ‘tools of imperialism’ under the French, the Americans did not make the connection between Diem’s rejection of the re-organization plan and the colonial legacy.133 Refusing to accept American advice was one way of defending against a new form of foreign domination. Diem and other Vietnamese officials frequently ‘resisted the Americans merely to demonstrate their independence, to themselves if to none other’, according to William Colby, who served as CIA station chief in Saigon during the late 1950s.134

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‘Vietnam’s finest’ In the aftermath of Diem’s refusal to accept the re-organization plan, the MSUG focused its efforts on training and equipping Vietnam’s civilian security forces. Nation-building remained the objective driving Michigan State’s work. Modern, professional, and efficient police would ‘contribute toward bringing internal security and a stable government to Vietnam and help make the government effective at the village level’, the MSUG reported in February 1956.135 By mid-1956 the university was reporting progress. MSUG personnel had created two institutions for improving the capabilities of police and paramilitary forces. At the National Police Academy in Saigon, university advisors had trained some 600 members of what USOM would later term ‘Vietnam’s finest’.136 At Quang Trung near Saigon, the university established a training centre where 11,000 Civil Guard officers and men received instruction. In the case of both institutions, MSUG involvement included the development of the curriculum, and the provision of advice in the day-to-day running of the programs.137 University personnel did not train the police or the Civil Guard directly. Rather, they trained the South Vietnamese instructors who would in turn teach the officers and men. Curricula designed by the MSUG included instruction topics such as police leadership, riot control, and weapon maintenance.138 University advisors also promoted modern law enforcement techniques in areas such as fingerprint identification, police records, crime detection, and communications.139 Improving the equipment of the civil security forces was another key priority for the MSUG trainers. Technically, USOM, rather than the university, provided weapons and matériel. However, the Michigan advisors drew up lists of desired items, such as small arms, ammunition, tear gas rounds and vehicles, and oversaw any associated training.140 In Washington, national security officials noted with approval developments in South Vietnam. Thanks to American assistance, the OCB concluded in July 1956, the South Vietnamese were developing both the will and the means to defeat subversive aggression. ‘[O]rganized resistance which might endanger the nation’s internal security has been greatly decreased’ the OCB continued, adding that ‘[p]rogress in making police services more effective increased the government’s capability for thwarting subversion’.141 The communists below the seventeenth parallel were in fact in retreat. Diem was in the midst of a fierce anti-communist campaign, which drove many cadres deep underground. Whether Diem’s inroads against the communists could be attributed to the American advice to the police and Civil Guard is difficult to judge. In all likelihood, however, it was mass arrests, torture and other brute repression rather than modern and humane police practices that drove opponents of the Diem government into quiescence.142 Whatever the explanation, the police assistance programs were the beneficiaries of what appeared to be an improving security situation in Vietnam. Washington believed that Diem’s successes would prompt the communists to redouble their attempts to subvert the South Vietnamese government. During fiscal year 1956, ICA committed $1.1 million to the Vietnam police program. That figure

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rose to $4.5 million in fiscal year 1957, with much of the growth going for new police vehicles, communications gear, and criminal laboratory equipment.143 The expanded American effort would also include an increase in the number of MSUG police advisory personnel. As of October 1955, eight police advisors were serving in Vietnam.144 During that month, the ICA authorized the university to add 14 more, and by 1957, 22 trainers were in place, out of a total staff of 34 Americans. At its peak, the MSUG staff in Saigon reached roughly 150, which included approximately 100 Vietnamese support personnel.145 At the same time, some ICA officials in Washington began questioning MSU’s role in Vietnam. Despite the university’s academic reputation, its overseas training experience, and its relationship with the Eisenhower administration, it seemed to some within the foreign aid agency that the US government had made a mistake in hiring MSU to assist Diem’s police agencies. In the non-policing areas of MSUG assistance to South Vietnam, the university could point to some clear accomplishments. Missions close to the university’s traditional educational role, such as the establishment of an academy for training Vietnamese civil servants, were widely seen as successful.146 The ICA’s concerns focused on two aspects of MSUG’s police assistance activities. First, the ICA criticized the MSUG’s counter-subversive training as inadequate.147 In the ICA’s judgement, university faculty members were temperamentally ill-suited for the dark realities of training secret police forces. The struggle against subversion, an ICA official said in January 1956, was hindered severely by ‘the naïve, sloppy, and faulty thinking which we all know to be found in the professorial field’.148 Although employing the shop-worn image of the dithering academic, the ICA was probably correct in its assertion that university staff were not ideal candidates to advise Diem’s political police. MSUG personnel seemed unaware of the role of the Sûreté in controlling dissent and subversion within South Vietnam. More broadly, the university advisors had no particular expertise in gathering political intelligence, monitoring dissident groups, or disrupting anti-government cells. Second, ICA officials were troubled by the fact that the US government had in effect ‘privatized’ an important official responsibility by contracting with a university to provide internal security assistance to South Vietnam. ICA’s concern was not limited to the MSUG. Throughout the late 1950s, and into the early 1960s, some policy-makers were also disturbed by the government’s ongoing contractual relationship with the International Association of the Chief of Police.149 MSUG personnel were aware that internal security was one of the most sensitive responsibilities of any government. Providing internal security support to a foreign government was inevitably a highly delicate matter involving issues of nationalist sensibilities, sovereignty, and perceptions of ‘meddling’ in the affairs of another country. The ICA raised a legitimate question when it asked whether hiring a university to perform this function represented an abrogation of official US responsibilities. These concerns led the ICA to recommend that the US government not renew its contract with Michigan State University and instead assume direct responsibility

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for supporting Diem’s police and paramilitary organizations.150 Senior Eisenhower administration officials, however, decided to continue its relationship with MSU, and in July 1957 the university and ICA signed a two-year follow-on contract. In one area, however, the US government did begin to shoulder a greater burden of the internal security assistance program in Vietnam. During the late 1950s, the CIA took on a much larger role in training the Sûreté. In bringing the training under the control of the CIA, which had extensive experience working with foreign counter-subversive agencies, the US government addressed the problem of the lack of MSUG expertise as well as the issue of the privatization of a critical official responsibility.151

Conclusion As Eisenhower told Congress in April 1955, Vietnam and the rest of Indochina faced the ‘continuing threat of aggression and subversion’.152 In their prescription for meeting South Vietnam’s security threats, Eisenhower and Dulles were essentially correct in downplaying the creation of a large Vietnamese army advocated by the JCS. Reflecting the administration’s emerging 1290-d internal security initiative for the developing world, the president advocated building up Diem’s police and paramilitary forces. On the ground in Saigon, however, the US agencies responsible for bolstering South Vietnam’s security were not united over what course of action was most suitable for strengthening the Diem government. American military and civilian advisors pursued separate paths. These parallel tracks did not lead to direct bureaucratic conflict during the mid-1950s. However, by the end of the decade, as the Vietnamese government faced the emergence of a full-blown insurgency, Diem’s American advisors clashed over how to respond, and the American assistance program became mired in inter-agency struggles over the proper role of South Vietnam’s internal security forces. Other aspects of the early period of US internal security assistance to South Vietnam foreshadowed later American frustrations. In the mid-1950s, as at the end of the decade, Diem’s political calculations thwarted MSUG’s reform agenda for South Vietnam’s police and paramilitary forces. The university advisors were hardly alone in their failure to appreciate the complexities of South Vietnam’s political environment. Robert S. McNamara, who served as the US Defense Secretary from 1961 to 1968, acknowledged in his memoirs that ‘[w]hen it came to Vietnam, we found ourselves setting policy for a region that was terra incognita’.153 In 1955, lacking police training manpower, the US government turned to MSU to carry out the administration’s 1290-d policy in a state deemed essential in the global campaign against communism. Within a year, however, some ICA officials had concluded correctly that a university was the wrong institution for conducting sensitive police training missions abroad. MSUG’s internal security assistance activities in Vietnam continued until the end of the decade. By then, after a long series of clashes with Diem and the MAAG, and a reappraisal of its own role in supporting the Diem regime, the university came to share the ICA’s earlier judgement.

3

The struggle for reform The United States and Diem’s internal security forces, 1956–8

Introduction In 1956, Ngo Dinh Diem launched a series of ferocious anti-communist operations across South Vietnam. Diem’s army and internal security forces jailed thousands of people the regime had identified as its internal enemies. These campaigns, according to an official Vietnamese communist party history, convinced the southern communists that Diem was ‘dangerously crafty and different from the previous puppets’.1 Fearing that Diem’s success would prompt the communists to re-double their efforts against the Saigon government, the United States increased its support to South Vietnam’s police and paramilitary forces. During the 1956–58 period, two Vietnamese organizations, the Sûreté and the Self-Defense Corps (SDC), featured prominently in the US internal security assistance program for the Diem regime. Examining the American support to these forces is important, for it helps further illustrate two factors that helped undermine American internal security assistance policy in Vietnam throughout the Eisenhower era. First, in the case of the Sûreté, American notions about the importance of ‘non-political’ policing led to US re-organization plans that clashed with Diem’s efforts to maintain a political equilibrium in South Vietnam. American assistance to the SDC highlighted a second theme, namely, the bureaucratic conflict between US civilian and military advisors who conceptualized South Vietnam’s security requirements in sharply different terms. Disagreement over the SDC foreshadowed the more serious struggle among American civilian officials and military officers during the late 1950s over the roles, missions, and direction of the Civil Guard.

Diem’s high-water mark During the mid-1950s, South Vietnam overcame the most immediate challenges to its survival, and Washington looked upon the achievements of the Diem regime with some measure of satisfaction. Diem’s pro-American and anti-communist credentials were secure. The American press and Congress lionized the South Vietnamese premier during his state visit to Washington in May, and there appeared to be little danger that he would lapse into what the Eisenhower

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administration considered to be the apostasy of “neutralism” – that is, a policy of non-alignment with either of the superpower blocs.2 Maintaining South Vietnam’s position as a member of the “free world” remained an important priority for the administration. As the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) stated in April 1957, the United States would bolster the Diem government’s ‘will and ability to resist Communism from within and without’.3 By 1957, the Diem regime was stabilizing. That stability allowed it to put additional pressure on the Viet Minh,4 whom Diem and his American sponsors now referred to as the ‘Vietnamese communists’ or ‘Viet Cong’ (Viet Nam Cong San).5 As part of his efforts to consolidate his power, Diem took administrative steps to strengthen his regime’s control over the countryside. In 1956, he ended the ancient Vietnamese tradition that permitted the peasantry to elect village officials. Henceforth, all local officials would be appointed directly by Diem. At the same time, Diem began militarizing district and province government by replacing civilian officials with military officers. These actions, according to Robert Scigliano, resulted in a centralization of authority under Diem far greater ‘than it ever was under the emperors or the French, and [was] surpassed only by the Communist bureaucracy created in North Vietnam’.6 A series of ‘Denounce the Communists’ campaigns led to the arrests of thousands of suspected Vietnamese communists and their supporters. In 1956, as many as 50,000 communists and their sympathizers were in South Vietnamese jails and re-education camps, according to one estimate.7 Aggressive operations by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam or ARVN (formerly the Vietnamese National Army) during the 1955–7 period took a toll on communists in the countryside. In addition to uncovering arms caches and arresting suspected communists, the military carried out civic action efforts such as repairing roads and schools intended to bolster popular support for the Saigon government. The military also conducted pro-government propaganda activities, including all-night anti-communist harangues over loudspeakers set up in villages. Americans occasionally noted such actions with concern, comparing them with ‘Iron Curtain’ instruments of indoctrination.8 In the end, however, the Americans accepted such methods as a necessary tool in the government’s efforts to establish control in the countryside. Indeed, such government operations succeeded in driving cadres from areas long held by the communists and helped to disrupt the party’s organizational structure.9 Diem’s police and paramilitary forces also contributed to the weakening of the rural party apparatus. In 1956, the Civil Guard killed or wounded an estimated 5,231 communist cadre.10 At the district level, networks of Sûreté informers provided information on the activities of the communists that could be exploited by the security forces.11 In Washington, State Department officials concluded that Diem’s campaign of anti-communist repression had led to a dramatic reduction in the number of Viet Cong cadre in South Vietnam, which had dropped from an estimated 10,000 in 1954 to approximately 1,500.12 Although there were a number of reported Viet Cong assassinations of Vietnamese government officials during the autumn of 1957, the communists, according to State Department, did not appear to threaten

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the stability of the Diem regime. A larger immediate concern, in the view of US officials, was the problem of banditry. In the absence of any real civilian police organization in the countryside, criminal elements carried out highway robberies and acts of piracy along the Mekong River, apparently with impunity.13 General Samuel T. Williams, commander of the MAAG in Saigon, supported Diem’s claim that the South Vietnamese internal security situation had improved greatly.14 American civilians on the ground were less sanguine about Diem’s anticommunist successes. In the view of the US embassy in Saigon, anti-Diem elements continued to pose a serious threat.15 Ultimately, the embassy would be proved correct. In the short term, however, the communist movement in South Vietnam was faltering.

The failure of the communist strategy Since 1954, Hanoi had followed a cautious course of action that stressed economic, social and political development in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The re-unification of Vietnam, under the control of the communist Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), was a central goal. But in the judgement of the Hanoi leadership, a strong DRV was the most immediate priority. In addition, the Hanoi leadership had concluded a policy of re-unification by peaceful means. A variety of factors contributed to the decision to pursue a non-military strategy below the seventeenth parallel. The Soviet Union, the DRV’s most important patron, had under Nikita Khrushchev adopted a policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the West, and thus was reluctant to promote violent revolution in South Vietnam, a country Washington identified as critical to American security. Hanoi was also eager to avoid a direct confrontation with the United States and face the possibility of American military power being employed in Indochina. Finally, Vietnamese communists were convinced that strictly political pressure from the southern revolutionary movement would be sufficient to bring about the collapse of the weak and illegitimate Diem regime.16 Consequently, Hanoi directed local leaders in the south to focus on promoting the unification of the country by political means.17 The thrust of activities in the south, according to the North Vietnamese Politburo, would be on essentially non-violent activities such as party-building, and agitation and propaganda, rather than on directly confronting the regime with violence. By June 1956, however, it had become apparent to the Vietnamese communists that the party’s strategy of peaceful struggle had failed, and that keeping the struggle strictly political would not lead to the country’s re-unification. Diem had made clear that South Vietnam would never participate in the elections to determine Vietnam’s future, as called for in the Geneva agreements. In addition, repressive campaigns undertaken by Diem had badly weakened the party apparatus in South Vietnam. As a result, Hanoi allowed southern cadres to use limited amounts of force for self-defence and ‘armed propaganda’. Secret instructions authorized VWP officials at the provincial level to assassinate village officials, police, teachers and other representatives of the Republic of Vietnam. However,

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Hanoi was still unwilling to sanction a full-scale guerrilla war with the Diem regime, declaring that the time was still not ripe for a direct armed confrontation with Diem.18 Southern communists, who were absorbing the full force of Diem’s repression, chafed under the restrictions imposed by Hanoi. Nevertheless, they appear to have abided by those constraints.19 To be sure, the Viet Cong could point to a number of successes. The communists created new base areas and expanded existing ones, their military base was growing, and the party had successfully infiltrated schools, religious groups, and professional associations. But Diem’s stepped-up repression, and growing government presence in the countryside, severely limited the party’s ability to operate. South Vietnam, in the words of one American newspaper, ‘was not going to fall to the communists like a ripe plum’.20 In 1957, Vietnamese security forces intensified their operations in the countryside, and according to a former communist cadre, the Diem government began to extend its influence deep into the countryside.21 The year 1957 represented Diem’s high-water mark of popular support and political viability, both within Vietnam and in Washington. Ultimately, the Diem regime’s savage and often indiscriminate repression benefited the opposition by alienating many non-communist Vietnamese caught up in the waves of arrests, torture and brutality. Ironically, the repression contributed to the development of a new and more effective communist strategy and a formal decision by Hanoi in 1959 to begin full-scale guerrilla operations against the Diem regime. For the present, however, Diem’s harsh measures weakened the communist infrastructure.

Police reform For the Michigan State University Group (MSUG) advisors in Vietnam, the country appeared far more tranquil than it did when they first arrived in May 1955. During their first year, Michigan State personnel confronted a crisis atmosphere, with government troops fighting fierce battles against sect dissidents, terrorist attacks in Saigon, and anti-Diem riots throughout the country.22 The disorder and violence was so severe that members of the MSUG were convinced that the country was at risk of falling to the communists within six months.23 University personnel faced dangerous conditions that made travel outside of the capital impossible without a bodyguard.24 Even for the advisers who had served in Asia during the Second World War, Vietnam was a strange and bewildering environment that startled many of the newly arrived Midwestern academics.25 In a newsletter for friends and family in the United States, Howard W. Hoyt, the senior police advisor, decried the lack of good highways, the absence of cottage cheese, and the late hour of dinner at one Vietnamese home, where the meal was not served until 9:20 pm.26 The pervasive atmosphere of violence and intrigue created psychological stress among the Michigan State advisors, and South Vietnam’s tropical conditions – including rampant mould, extreme heat, and amoebic dysentery – contributed to what one MSUG report termed ‘physical disorders [and] debilitating effect[s]’.27

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By 1957, the situation in Saigon had improved dramatically. Overall, the atmosphere of crisis had eased. The sects had been effectively neutralized, the communists appeared to be far weaker, the economy was beginning to improve, and Vietnam had entered a period of relative tranquillity. Diem and his American backers stepped up their efforts to strengthening South Vietnam’s internal security apparatus. Although Diem had his disagreements with the MSUG over such issues as the re-organization of the country’s security forces, he appeared satisfied with university’s performance. Non-security assistance in areas such as public administration, taxation and personnel would be a feature of the second phase of the MSUG program, but as with the previous contract, the largest area of activity would be the support of police and paramilitary forces. The university began an intense period of police and paramilitary assistance. MSUG’s objectives were threefold: re-organization, modernization and training.28 From fiscal year 1956 through fiscal year 1958, the US government, through Michigan State, would provide a total of approximately $10 million in assistance to these forces.29 The vast bulk of this aid went toward the provision of hardware.30 In fiscal year 1958, for example, the United States supplied $1.6 million in communications equipment, small arms, and ammunition. Assistance also included the provision of modern fingerprinting equipment, motor vehicles and, beginning in 1959, equipment for a new national identity card program. By contrast, the personnel costs associated with MSUG’s police advisors, at $500,000 for fiscal year 1958, were comparatively small.31 As noted in the previous chapter, MSU did not purchase or provide security-related matériel directly. Rather, university personnel gave advice on what should be obtained and drew up lists of desired items. Upon the approval of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), police-related equipment was shipped to Vietnam as part of what Ralph Smuckler, a MSUG chief advisor during the late 1950s, termed ‘the normal flow of U.S. aid support in many fields, e.g., agriculture, education, public works and public health’.32 In sum, the university served as a middleman or broker between its police clients and the US aid bureaucracy. The glaring weaknesses of the internal security forces identified by university advisors in 1955 and 1956 remained. Roles and missions were ill-defined, organization was poor, training remained sub-standard, the forces were badly equipped, and political interference was endemic.33 However, the university advisors were confident that more equipment, better training, and the re-organization of Diem’s internal security forces would transform the police and paramilitary forces. If these reforms were made, according to Hoyt, no further American police assistance would be required after 30 June 1960.34

Re-organizing the Sûreté The United States identified two broad goals for South Vietnam’s internal security forces. First, Washington expected these institutions to contribute to nation-building by providing routine public safety services to the Vietnamese people. Second, the Eisenhower administration believed that it was essential to create civilian

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police agencies capable of identifying and rooting out subversive threats to the Diem government. As the Americans quickly discovered, South Vietnam’s police and paramilitary forces were tainted by corruption, incompetence, and an unpalatable French colonial legacy. This combination of ineptitude and an unsavory past was particularly pronounced in the case of the Sûreté, the police organization with primary responsibility for defending the Diem regime against its internal adversaries. By 1954, with Vietnam nominally under the authority of Emperor Bao Dai, the Sûreté became a tool of the politico-criminal Binh Xuyen organization, controlling not only Saigon’s prostitution, gambling and opium trafficking, but also public permits, licenses, and even the shipment and sale of pork.35 The MSUG advisors focused on the Sûreté’s widespread technical and organizational problems. Agents were found to lack proper training, vehicles and small arms, radio communications equipment was completely non-existent, and the Sûreté lacked modern fingerprinting and record-keeping systems. The MSUG experts were also appalled by the decentralized system of command and control over the organization’s 5,500 personnel. Such arrangements were preventing the Sûreté from ‘discharging its responsibilities to the people of Vietnam’, as Hoyt told General Nguyen Ngoc Le, the agency’s director, in June 1956.36 Three regional directors exercised separate control within their jurisdictions, with little or no co-ordination by the Sûreté director general in Saigon, or by the Ministry of the Interior, which had ultimate authority over the organization.37 The role of the country’s 38 province chiefs in Sûreté activities also troubled the MSUG advisors. These chiefs, who served as administrators in their regions, were appointed by the South Vietnamese president, although they nominally answered to the interior minister. These officials exercised extensive power over police activities within their dominions. Personnel decisions, such as promotions or transfers, required the approval of the province chiefs, who also retained the right to order the release of any prisoner held by civilian internal security forces.38 This arrangement was characteristic of Diem, who was always eager to ensure that his internal security agencies were responsive to his political needs. To the MSUG, however, the influence of the province chiefs was contrary to the tenets of American law enforcement, which deplored the influence of politics on police operations.39 To address the problem, the MSUG in 1956 proposed re-structuring the Sûreté. Under the university’s plan, the agency’s largely autonomous regional fiefdoms would be eliminated, and the Sûreté director would have much greater control over his organization. Such a re-organization, the American advisors hoped, would also reduce the ability of the province chiefs to meddle in Sûreté field operations. In addition, the MSUG proposed a set of measures designed to improve the professionalism of Sûreté personnel, such as the establishment of a formal system of evaluation and examinations for promotion. The university advisors urged the agency to consider new policies with respect to the organization’s leadership, which in the university’s view had been weakened by the all-too-frequent replacement of senior commanders.40 Finally, the MSUG plan called on the Sûreté

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to ensure that its personnel were completely civilian. The Diem regime was in the process of ‘militarizing’ much of the country’s civil administration by placing military officers in previously civilian positions such as province chief. American police advisors had long impressed on the Vietnamese the importance of nonpolitical, civilian law enforcement. ‘In the United States, a firm policy exists among all Federal law enforcement agencies that no member thereof may participate in any political activity whatsoever except voting’, Hoyt told Nguyen Ngoc Le in June 1956, adding that ‘in no instance may an active military officer be employed by any of these law enforcement agencies’.41 Diem and his advisors received some aspects of the MSUG plan favorably. The Vietnamese agreed to the portions of the proposal that called for the provision of new vehicles, fingerprint identification technology, communications gear, and other matériel. But as with earlier MSUG initiatives, the Vietnamese resisted American meddling in sensitive organizational matters. As the MSUG would acknowledge in 1960, ‘progress has been slower when matters of organization and administration and concepts or philosophies have been involved’.42 By late June 1957, a year after the proposal was made, the Vietnamese had effectively refused to implement the university’s plan to centralize the agency under the organization’s director general, and province chiefs continued to exert influence over Sûreté operations.43 Even seemingly non-controversial initiatives, such as the establishment of promotion exams, were rejected by the Vietnamese.44 The Vietnamese opposition to the MSUG plan was based on factors that doomed the university’s other early police initiatives. Centralizing authority, strengthening command and control, and removing political influence from police operations may have been an appropriate set of measures for improving police forces in Mississippi, Iowa, or California. But when applied to Vietnam under Diem, they were destined to meet with serious resistance. During the 1950s and 1960s, US decision-makers and academics believed that centralization of public administration in the developing world was both desirable and inevitable.45 In some respects, Diem was a centralizer. He extended his control of the countryside by appointing local officials and by strengthening the powers of the province chiefs. Diem saw his grip on power as tenuous, however. In general, Diem considered centralization to be anathema, except in the case of organizations he controlled directly, since it might allow rivals to accrue power. Whenever possible, Diem defused power by creating multiple institutions with overlapping missions and functions. This was particularly true in the area of internal security organizations. With the ability to gather intelligence, conduct covert operations, and harass and intimidate opponents of his family’s rule, such forces possessed a singular form of power that could be dangerous to Diem if it were centralized in the wrong hands. In the case of the province chief’s influence over operations, the MSUG innocently assumed that this stemmed from an urge to extend democratic, local control over the security forces.46 In all likelihood, Diem encouraged such meddling not to promote grass-roots accountability, but to keep the regional Sûreté directors off balance. Similarly, Diem was likely to look unfavourably upon any plan that gave the Sûreté director general greater control

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over the forces nominally under his command. A strengthened director able to exercise greater command and control over the Sûreté might pose a significant threat to Diem and his family’s rule.

Political policing and the MSUG The MSU personnel tasked with reforming the Sûreté were aware of the organization’s sordid history of corruption and repression.47 The university advisors were less appreciative of the Sûreté’s current role as a political instrument employed by Diem to maintain power. The MSUG personnel saw their mission in largely technical terms, and chose to emphasize the development of effective organization and management, the provision of equipment, and the infusion of modern management techniques. The MSUG advisors envisaged themselves as ‘technical advisors – not policy makers’, according to an in-house university magazine.48 Diem’s American experts were steeped in a mid-century worldview characterized by a faith in reason, progress, and the ability to solve concrete problems. American advice, which tended to ignore the harsh reality of Vietnamese history and politics, stressed the universal applicability of US law enforcement philosophies and techniques.49 Although later they were to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that the university helped bolster an organization whose primary purpose was to repress adversaries of the Diem regime, at the time members of the MSUG downplayed the Sûreté’s harsh purpose. MSUG advisors occasionally hinted at the agency’s repressive function. The purpose of the Sûreté, a MSUG advisor noted in 1956, was to ‘correlate all information regarding the security of the state and to discover the plots and activities which are capable of compromising the public order’.50 The Sûreté’s 20-man Political Information Bureau, he observed, was responsible for keeping sect members, ‘dissident Catholics’, and Viet Minh under surveillance.51 However, the bulk of his report, like many others from the period, ignores the agency’s fundamentally political purpose. Even when Vietnamese officials themselves discussed the political focus of the Sûreté, MSU advisors passed along the observations without further comment. As one MSUG advisor reported in 1957, the director general of the Sûreté described the vast majority of violent crimes as politically motivated actions designed to ‘discredit the government and strengthen the Communist cause’, adding that ‘[t]he crimes in the South are almost all political’.52 Despite such evidence of the Sûreté’s political orientation, the MSUG personnel did not ponder the implications of advising an organization whose purpose was to suppress challenges to the authority of the Diem regime. Police advisors often appeared unaware that the Diem regime was fighting for its existence against an adversary determined to establish communist rule in Vietnam. At the same time, MSUG personnel generally ignored the fact that Diem often employed ruthless, arbitrary and violent means against anyone he or members of his family considered to be opponents of the regime. Put another way, MSUG approached the reform of South Vietnam’s internal security apparatus as though the country

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were a democracy at peace. The MSUG advisors dealt with South Vietnam as if it were a ‘normal’ Western nation like the United States at mid-century, rather than as what Walter A. McDougall has called ‘a rice-based, Confucian, post-colonial, war-torn, Southeast Asian culture’.53 The MSUG’s sanguine attitude about the Sûreté’s comparatively modest size suggests that the university advisors did not fully appreciate the agency’s countersubversive mandate and the nature of the communist challenge to the Diem regime. Although the VBI was scheduled to increase from 5,475 to 6,500 personnel, they were expected to perform their mission in a 66,200 square-mile country of some 12 million people, in which a determined adversary, supported by a foreign power, was attempting to build support for communist revolution.54 Professor Wesley R. Fishel, serving at the time as the MSUG’s chief advisor, went so far as to suggest that if the VBI received sufficient training and equipment and were re-organized properly, the number of personnel could be reduced to 3,500.55 The American penchant for defining Vietnamese security in US terms may also explain the MSUG’s lack of recognition of the Sûreté’s political missions. A few disgruntled leftists and communist ‘fellow-travellers’ aside, few Americans during the 1950s saw US law enforcement agencies such as the FBI as serving a political function. They existed to solve crimes and, on occasion, to ferret out spies. Coming from an environment in which agencies like the FBI were viewed in essentially non-political terms, the MSUG advisors deemed the Sûreté as a counterpart to an American law enforcement organization like the FBI.56 The curious decision in the late 1950s to re-name the Sûreté highlights the tendency of American advisors to define South Vietnam’s internal security problems in US terms. It is unclear who took the decision, but in all likelihood it was American police advisors who re-christened it the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation (VBI). An attempt to somehow link the VBI with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seems almost certain. During the 1950s, the FBI, thanks in part to bureau-produced books and articles and sympathetic Hollywood producers, was widely seen in the United States as the world’s pre-eminent law enforcement agency, incorruptible, highly efficient, and above politics. Re-naming the Sûreté, and in so doing tying it to the FBI, may have been an attempt to boost the Sûreté’s prestige. Abandoning its French name may have also reflected a desire to remove the agency’s colonial taint. However, changing the organization’s name in such a fashion could have alienated Vietnamese nationalists, who might have preferred a more distinctly indigenous title that did not highlight the country’s dependence on the United States. In addition, the FBI–VBI linkage could have easily been exploited by the Vietnamese communists, whose propaganda continuously stressed Diem’s supposed status as a US puppet. Indeed, communist propagandists routinely referred to the South Vietnamese regime as My-Diem (‘American-Diem’).57

MSUG, the VBI, and the CIA In Washington, concerns about the ability of university professors to advise and train Vietnam’s counter-subversive police prompted the Eisenhower administration

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to explore new ways of assisting the Sûreté. The CIA had extensive experience in supplying counter-subversive assistance to police forces in the developing world, often under ICA cover.58 As part of the Eisenhower administration’s 1290-d initiative and the Overseas Internal Security Program (OISP), CIA experts gave technical advice and training to improve the ability of foreign police to identify and investigate communists and other subversives. At the urging of the White House, John A. Hannah, the Michigan State University (MSU) president, allowed CIA officers to assist the VBI under the auspices of the MSUG.59 More than forty years later, the exact number of CIA officers involved, and the precise nature and scope of their activities remains shrouded in government secrecy.60 As Robert Scigliano and Guy H. Fox have concluded, the ‘[l]ack of adequate information makes it impossible to assess the work that several persons conducted with a special internal security unit of the sûreté between 1955 and 1959’.61 However, some aspects of the CIA’s relationship with the university training program in Vietnam have come to light. Technically, the CIA advisors worked as MSU employees, nominated by the ICA and then hired on approval of the university.62 The CIA personnel were under the authority of the MSUG in Saigon, and their activities within the VBI were ostensibly limited to training.63 In an undated and unsigned MSUG memorandum of agreement – presumably with the US government – the signatories agreed that police training personnel were not to ‘engage in direct operations but will have teaching and training as their primary duties’.64 However, it is likely that CIA officers also used their positions inside one of South Vietnam’s most sensitive organs to gather information about the activities of the regime and its opponents. Although the university insisted that the MSUG was not a front for CIA espionage activities, it nevertheless grew uncomfortable with the relationship. MSU, Smuckler recalled, had a ‘gut reaction that a university shouldn’t be doing this in a non-democratic country’.65 In 1959, Smuckler arranged for the United States Operations Mission (USOM), the ICA’s field office in Vietnam, to assume responsibility for VBI training.66 The CIA’s use of the MSUG during this period was something of an open secret in Saigon. The university certainly did not broadcast the nature of the relationship, but it became common knowledge within the American expatriate community that US intelligence officers were employed by the MSUG.67 When the CIA–MSUG relationship was revealed in an obscure academic monograph published by Scigliano and Fox in 1965, it generated no political controversy. 68 That was to come in the following April, with the appearance of a sensationalistic article in a left-wing magazine alleging that the university, as a ‘front’ for the CIA, was instrumental in propping up the repressive Diem regime.69 Although the MSUG project had ended four years earlier, the article came at a time of growing anti-war sentiment within the United States, and it strengthened the left’s charge that American universities had become creatures of a malevolent US foreign policy.70 Revelations about MSU’s police training activities in Vietnam also led to much distress among the academic mainstream. Natural scientists had been engaged in military-sponsored research and development since the First World

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War, but social scientists were more involved in politically charged projects on behalf of the state.71 For some academic critics of MSU’s involvement with the CIA, that episode had portentous implications, suggesting, among other things, that the nexus between academia and the national security establishment was eroding the autonomy from official authority that universities had enjoyed since the Middle Ages.72

Conflict over the SDC During 1957, discord emerged within the US government, and between the government and Diem, over what needed to be done to strengthen Vietnam’s internal security capabilities. Disagreement centred on the SDC, a rural militia established by the Vietnamese president the previous June over the US embassy’s objections. Among American civilians in Saigon, scepticism about the utility of the SDC remained. Diem sought to create a much larger force than the Americans deemed prudent. The corps in August 1957 numbered roughly 51,000, and Diem wanted to expand the force to 60,000.73 In the judgement of the US ambassador, Elbridge Dubrow, who assumed his post in March, a 30,000-man SDC was more than adequate. While Dubrow did not propose scrapping the SDC, he maintained strong reservations about it, as did MSUG and USOM personnel. The SDC was indeed unimpressive. The militia’s performance was poor, despite nearly two years of substantial US financial assistance. What is more, the Viet Cong, the adversary the SDC was expected to help vanquish, had thoroughly infiltrated corps units throughout the country.74 The US military, on the other hand, remained enthusiastic about the force. The MAAG’s focus was on the future, and on the corps’ latent utility in the struggle for South Vietnam’s rural security. Lt. General John W. O’Daniel, the former MAAG commander, during a visit in the spring of 1957 praised the SDC as a badly needed ‘sponge … to absorb infiltrations’.75 According to Williams, the SDC offered great potential as a deterrent to Viet Cong activity in areas not otherwise protected by Vietnamese military or civilian security forces. The SDC, Williams argued, ‘holds promise of giving a big return for a relatively small investment’. The MAAG envisaged the SDC as a static security force that would defend fixed positions in the Republic of Vietnam’s villages and hamlets. In so doing, it would free the Vietnamese army to concentrate on preparing for conventional war. The SDC, scattered about the countryside, would also help build popular support for the Diem regime by demonstrating to the rural population that the Saigon government could provide adequate protection. What was required, in the judgement of the MAAG chief, was a strengthened SDC, with improved training and a more military organization and orientation.76 How can this divergence in official US opinion about the SDC be explained? In part, the disagreement reflected a conflict over what kinds of forces the Diem regime required to defend itself against its internal adversaries. For the civilians, the answer was a more capable, better-trained civilian police apparatus. Non-military forces, in this conception, would not only serve as a more effective first line

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of defense against subversion and instability, but would do so at a much lower cost than those associated with the armed forces. In addition, civilian security forces would contribute to America’s nation-building objectives in the Republic of Vietnam by serving as a representative of the modern, professional administrative state. At the same time, US civilian officials in Saigon were concerned that Diem was devoting too many of the country’s resources to developing Vietnam’s repressive organizations. To be sure, more capable internal security forces were recognized as important for achieving American aims. However, American civilians like Dubrow also believed that economic development was essential if South Vietnam was to survive as an independent, non-communist nation. American economic and technical assistance, in helping to raise living standards, would at the same time deny to the communists critical raw material for their propaganda.77 In Dubrow’s judgement, the SDC was not merely ineffective. It was also helping to short-change essential civilian projects designed to foster a better quality of life for the South Vietnamese. As a result, according to the ambassador, Diem was falling into a trap set by the communists. Their campaign of violence and subversion, in Dubrow’s view, was intended in part to induce Diem to spend more on the police and the military, which in turn would mean fewer resources for economic development and thus, greater popular alienation from the regime.78 The MAAG entertained a different conception of what was needed to defend the Diem regime against its adversaries. Williams’ desire to militarize the SDC and turn it into an auxiliary of the Vietnamese army reflected the ‘big war’ US Army mindset of the mid-1950s. Furthermore, Williams enjoyed a close relationship with Diem throughout his tenure as the MAAG chief, and was a staunch advocate for the South Vietnamese president within the US national security bureaucracy. Given that Diem was the creator of the SDC concept, and defended it tenaciously in the face of criticism from Dubrow and other Americans, Williams may have supported the militia partly out of deference to the South Vietnamese leader. Controversy over the SDC marked the beginning of an extended period of conflict among American civilian and military advisors over the direction of the US internal security assistance programs in Vietnam. For the MSUG, their optimism was increasingly tempered by a growing recognition of the intractability of the problems they faced. During the spring of 1957, the MSUG predicted continued progress in all phases of the university’s assistance to South Vietnam.79 By August, the university police advisors were far less sanguine. The MSUG conceded that it was failing to make headway in terms of reforming the South Vietnamese security forces, and the university advisors were convinced that this lack of progress was eroding support for the program in Washington.80 The university’s fears were in fact misplaced. Despite ICA’s reports to the OCB about the continued inadequacies of South Vietnam’s internal security forces, senior administration policy-makers decided to renew the MSU contract for another two years.

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Conclusion During the 1956–8 period, South Vietnam was well on its way to becoming what Anthony Short has called ‘a permanent mendicant’, utterly dependent on US assistance for its continued existence.81 For its part, the Eisenhower administration deemed such support essential, both for the survival of the Diem regime, and for its broader symbolic value in South East Asia. A stable and secure South Vietnam, in the administration’s view, would serve as a powerful counter-example to the communist DRV, and would help persuade other states in the region not to pursue a policy of neutralism.82 Most of the American aid went to support Diem’s armed forces, which consumed 80 percent of the overall US assistance.83 Despite this stress on building South Vietnam’s army, the Eisenhower administration by no means ignored the subversive threats to the Diem regime. Examining American assistance to two of South Vietnam’s internal security forces, the Sûreté and the SDC, reveals the elements that helped thwart US internal security policy in Vietnam throughout the mid- and late-1950s. For the MSUG police advisors, nation-building required the creation of modern, professional police forces free from political interference. The university’s reform plan for the Sûreté clashed with Diem’s political requirements. Although the Sûreté appeared badly organized and inefficient to American outsiders, its decentralization and political permeability allowed Diem to influence its leadership and operations and in so doing protect his political position. While nation-building was a pillar of US internal security policy, the Eisenhower administration also saw the need to help the Diem government develop counter-subversive capabilities. The MSUG was unable to support this second pillar, and thus turned to the CIA to supply the Sûreté with the required training and advice. The US assistance to the SDC revealed the latent conflict between American civilian and military advisors in Saigon. For the civilians, the SDC was a waste of scarce (American) resources that could be better used elsewhere. Indeed, the SDC was almost risible in its inability to carry out its responsibilities. In one province, an SDC corpsman, while on duty, was observed carrying a rifle whose bolt was missing. More alarmingly, the SDC ranks were frequently populated with what the MSUG termed ‘former thieves, bandits, Viet Cong and [other] dissident elements who cannot be trusted’.84 The MAAG, on the other hand, chose to see the SDC glass as half-full. The SDC idea was Diem’s, and Williams, a staunch supporter of the Vietnamese president, chose to focus on the corps’ potential. Williams expected that the corps, trained and equipped along US military lines, would free the Vietnamese army to concentrate on prepared for conventional armed conflict with the North Vietnamese. In the case of the Civil Guard, competing American conceptions about South Vietnam’s internal security requirements would lead to a full-blown bureaucratic struggle between Diem’s US advisors.

4

Competing conceptions The United States, Diem and the Civil Guard, 1955–61

Introduction ‘Americans in Viet-Nam’, a French journalist observed in 1958, ‘very sincerely believe that in transplanting their institutions, they will immunize South VietNam against Communist propaganda’.1 Britain, France, and other European powers, in the context of colonialism, had also tried to establish their political, social, and economic institutions abroad. Unlike the Europeans, however, the United States attempted to graft its institutions indirectly, and in a new and fragile country wracked by conflict. In Vietnam, America sometimes succeeded in creating ‘mirror images’ of some of its institutions, most notably the army. But as the United States discovered in the case of the Civil Guard, transferring American law enforcement institutions to South Vietnam was fraught with bureaucratic and political obstacles. The Civil Guard episode is worth considering for four reasons. First, the paramilitary force became the subject of an intense controversy between Diem and US civilian officials, and between American civilian and military advisors. Vietnam scholars have identified competing US conceptions about the direction of the Civil Guard as the source of that conflict.2 Exploring the Eisenhower administration’s assistance to the guard during the 1955–61 period confirms that claim. Second, examining the episode reinforces the argument that American police advisors sought to impose a de-politicized and theoretical solution to South Vietnam’s rural security problems. The third reason is related to the second. The struggle over the guard demonstrated the difficulty in convincing a Third World ally to accept US nostrums about internal security. ‘American sway over Diem was always ephemeral’, as Stanley Karnow has observed, and nowhere was this more true than in the case of the Civil Guard.3 Fourth, the Civil Guard incident revealed the pitfalls of engaging an American university to address what one observer termed ‘abnormal law and order requirements in a revolutionary situation’.4 The Michigan State University (MSUG) advisors were hardworking, with a strong background in US law enforcement administration and a genuine commitment to helping South Vietnam.5 Ultimately, however, they were overwhelmed by the Vietnamese and by their bureaucratic adversaries in the US Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG).

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Origins of US assistance to the Civil Guard The seeds for future controversy over the Civil Guard were sown during the earliest days of US assistance to the Diem regime.6 In establishing the guard in April 1955, Diem did not articulate a specific set of missions for the new force, or its ultimate purpose and responsibilities.7 The South Vietnamese leader, in all likelihood, was interested in acquiring more armed security units while maintaining maximum flexibility in terms of how they would be employed. American officials in Saigon, on the other hand, had somewhat more defined ideas about the new organization’s roles, missions and functions, although those ideas were in fact contradictory. Ambassador J. Lawton Collins, Eisenhower’s special representative in Vietnam during 1954 and 1955, was alarmed by the strength of the sects and the Viet Minh and by the weakness of the regime’s security forces. The Vietnamese National Army or VNA (soon renamed the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN) was responsible for military operations against the armed opposition, while the municipal police were responsible for maintaining law and order in the country’s larger cities. Collins saw the Civil Guard as a third force with the quasi-military function of keeping areas clear of Viet Minh and the sects once the VNA had swept them out. In Collins view, the guard should protect lines of communications, protect bridges and other installations, and root out any armed units that had managed to re-infiltrate.8 At the same time, Collins conceptualized the Civil Guard as an American-style state police force that would perform routine police functions in rural areas. Echoing the nation-building themes of the Eisenhower administration’s 1290-d foreign internal security assistance program, Collins argued that the Civil Guard, operating like an American state police force, would help extend the Saigon government’s presence into the countryside. Indeed, White House policy-makers expected the Civil Guard to evolve into a purely law enforcement agency.9 This nation-building mission, however, was in conflict with the paramilitary duties Collins envisaged for the guard. The static defense of roads and installations was necessarily a manpower-intensive function that would divert large numbers of personnel from any contemplated police activities in the countryside. Although employing the Civil Guard in this fashion would create some government presence in rural areas, it was far different from using the force as a true rural police that would enforce laws, settle disputes, and protect peasants from violence. Ultimately, over the objection of police-oriented US officials and university advisors, the guard’s quasi-military role took precedence over its rural law-enforcement role. Although the force was new, the Civil Guard equipment was old, composed primarily of obsolete French small arms. Discipline was poor, many guardsmen were illiterate, and morale was low.10 The force lacked experienced officers and instructors, its training facilities were non-existent, and its communication network was antiquated.11 Although the guard in its initial days was supported out of Vietnamese government funds, the financial burden for the guard rested ultimately with the United States, which provided much of the revenue for the country’s national budget.12

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In November 1955, Diem decided to place the new force directly under his authority, in the office of the presidency. Day-to-day operational control was left in the hands of the country’s provinces chiefs, each of whom was appointed by and answerable to the South Vietnamese leader.13 Although US officials did not comment on Diem’s decision at the time it was taken, Diem’s command and control arrangements would later prove to be a major source of frustration for US police advisors who sought to make the Civil Guard more efficient and less politicized.

‘A modern rural police system’ The Diem government began training the new Civil Guard in the autumn of 1955. The United States assumed direct responsibility for the force shortly thereafter. As with other components of the US internal assistance effort in Vietnam, the US government turned to MSU to provide advice and training. However, each of the American civilian organizations involved had a somewhat different interpretation of the Civil Guard’s purpose. Collins described a dual paramilitary and law enforcement role for the guard, a conception shared by the US Operations Mission (USOM), the Saigon field office of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA).14 Although the USOM’s view changed over time, in 1955 it was in fact in conflict with the Civil Police Division (CPD) at ICA headquarters in Washington, which saw the guard as a civilian agency whose mission was limited to providing law police protection in the Vietnamese countryside.15 From the earliest days of its involvement in Vietnam, the MSUG subscribed to this ‘pure police’ conception of the Civil Guard.16 Neither the relevant primary nor secondary sources suggest precisely why the MSUG embraced this view of the force. It seems likely, however, that the university’s civilian police administration orientation and experience – which had, after all, helped convince the US government to hire MSU in the first place – helped shape MSUG’s views on what the Civil Guard’s roles, missions, and functions should be. Standing at roughly 52,000 men, and comparable in size to the army, the guard was by far the largest of Vietnam’s internal security forces. The MSUG saw the force as being ‘somewhat similar to a combined American state police force, a sheriff’s department, and National Guard’.17 The Civil Guard was expected to follow what the university advisors termed ‘stateside patterns’ of law enforcement and the administration of justice.18 As they were attempting to do with the Sûreté during the same period, the MSUG embarked on an effort to create a modern, professional, non-political police organization in the American image. By the end of the decade, South Vietnam would be embroiled in a full-scale rural insurgency. But during the mid-1950s, as calm and order appeared to be returning, conditions seemed ripe for establishing a peacetime police force. The ICA, which became sharply critical of the university’s performance, conceded as much. With South Vietnam enjoying comparative stability, the ICA concluded, ‘it appeared logical to look forward to the creation of this civil guard as a sort of extension of the police system in the larger cities for the protection of the village people’.19

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The MSUG program for the Civil Guard reflected this policing philosophy. The university police technicians trained the guard indirectly. MSUG designed programs of instruction, gave lectures, and trained cadres of Vietnamese instructors, who provided the actual classroom training. The university approach stressed training with modern but simple weapons. On the recommendation of MSUG advisors, the ICA supplied the Civil Guard with liberal amounts of basic police equipment, including Land Rovers, rudimentary radios, and uniforms.20 The guard was instructed to operate at the village level, responding to robbery, burglary, murder and other crimes against persons and property.21 Training lectures emphasized the preservation of the peace, the protection of life and property, and the prevention and detection of crime.22 Traffic control, being of great concern to American public safety officials at home, was duly recognized by the MSUG advisors, who sent at least one guardsman to America for a year to study traffic engineering.23 By the spring of 1957, more than 14,000 guardsmen had received training designed by MSUG.24 But despite this sustained US effort, the Civil Guard remained a third-rate force crippled by poor morale, inadequate leadership, and insufficient equipment. Edward Lansdale, the US air force colonel seconded to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Vietnam, described the almost comically ill-prepared Civil Guard outposts in the countryside: [they] were homey affairs, in which the Civil Guard … lived with their families. As I drove along the provincial roads past these outposts, I saw how well they seemed to fit into the bucolic scenery, the family wash drying in the sun and scads of children playing around the yard.25 Notwithstanding the MSUG’s attempts to professionalize the guard, it remained undisciplined in the field, as illustrated by their performance during Diem’s 1955–7 crackdown on Viet Minh cadres. Corrupt and frequently brutal in their treatment of civilians they encountered, the Civil Guard, as representatives of the Saigon government, helped to alienate the rural population from the Diem regime, and confirmed Viet Minh propaganda about the repressive nature of the South Vietnamese state.26 Four factors contributed to the guard’s poor performance during the 1955–7 period. The first involved the Civil Guard’s low status within South Vietnam. Most Vietnamese viewed the force with contempt. The military used the Civil Guard as a dumping ground for inferior military officers, further adding to the organization’s downward spiral, a trend American policy contributed to indirectly.27 The other three factors implicated the American approach more directly. ‘Colonialism by ventriloquism’ The guard’s MSUG advisors operated under a set of political conditions that had a pronounced effect on the advisory relationship with the Civil Guard. That framework compelled the guard’s American advisors to adopt a laboriously indirect role.

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Benjamin C. Schwarz has claimed that the United States has traditionally been ‘entirely uncomfortable with the role of proconsul’.28 During the first half of the twentieth century, the United States did on occasion exercise colonial-like authority, most notably in the Philippines and Japan. However, the Eisenhower administration encountered South Vietnam in a far different context. American efforts in the first half of the century to remake or dramatically reform foreign societies took place in the context of US military intervention or occupation. In the case of Vietnam, as in the rest of the contested developing world, the United States was eager to avoid the direct commitment of American forces. The Eisenhower administration’s support for Diem was predicated on the notion that the United States was assisting an independent nation struggling to resist communist aggression. If Diem was a free-world partner, America could not treat South Vietnam as a US satrapy. The United States took an indirect approach. It established a network of advisors who sought to persuade the Vietnamese to accept American advice, and in so doing, carried out ‘colonialism by ventriloquism’, in William E. Odom’s words.29 Neither the MSUG team nor any agency of the US government had operational control of the Civil Guard or other Vietnamese internal security agencies.30 Unlike a traditional colonial power, the United States in Vietnam could not simply take charge and rebuild the country’s institutions. Rather, America was engaged in continuous negotiation with the Saigon government. MSUG could nudge, advise and cajole their Civil Guard clients, but the university personnel had no formal authority to command the South Vietnamese. The US police model The third problem was conceptual. As with the Sûreté, the MSUG advisors approached the Civil Guard as they would a deficiency-plagued American police force. University advisors had some experience in police training outside of the United States, but no specialized knowledge of Vietnam. Vietnamese officers and men resisted instruction in police topics such as criminal investigation and traffic control, arguing that they were inappropriate for the guard’s military-like functions. As the MSUG would later admit, university personnel knew nothing about the Napoleonic Code upon which the country’s legal system was based.31 The advice the MSUG personnel gave was technical and ostensibly apolitical, and it side-stepped the messy but ultimately unavoidable realities of South Vietnam during the second half of the 1950s. Governed by an autocratic leader faced with powerful internal and external adversaries, South Vietnam was in no sense a ‘normal’ democratic environment amenable to American-style public administration nostrums. South Vietnam had the trappings of a modern, Western-style state, with a president, officer corps, and civil servants. However, ‘[t]here was no cohesion, no loyalty to the centre, no centre … [only] the illusion of legitimacy’, J. Bowyer Bell has rightly observed.32

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Ignoring Vietnamese politics A related problem was the American failure to consider Diem’s political environment, which hobbled efforts to transform Vietnam’s other civilian security agencies. Diem was attempting a difficult balancing act with the Civil Guard. As a number of scholars have noted, Diem believed that a strong paramilitary organization was needed to check the burgeoning strength of the Vietnamese army.33 At the same time, however, Diem feared that a too-powerful guard, commanded by politically ambitious officers, could potentially threaten his family’s rule. Yet many of the Americans involved in strengthening South Vietnam’s internal security failed to note the political intent behind Diem’s actions. A case in point is the American frustration over Diem’s frequent replacement of senior Civil Guard leaders. Intent on professionalizing the force to meet Western organizational standards, the MSUG often decried Diem’s incessant rotation of senior officers.34 The university personnel, however, failed to recognize that in all likelihood, Diem moved senior figures in and out of the Civil Guard to prevent the formation of anti-government cliques and to keep the organization from becoming too powerful. Purposeful meddling was an essential component of Diem’s strategy for maintaining power. Similarly, American officials did not grasp Diem’s motivation for rejecting the US suggestion to reduce the size of South Vietnam’s internal security forces, including the Civil Guard. The Americans believed that such cuts were necessary to promote greater governmental efficiency.35 Such advice, however, ran contrary to Diem’s domestic political goals, which included developing strong paramilitary forces as a counterweight to the power of the South Vietnamese armed forces.

Diem and the Civil Guard The South Vietnamese president’s conception of the roles and missions of the Civil Guard differed sharply from that of his MSU advisors. For Diem, unlike the university trainers, creating a well-equipped, modern, conventional military force was an urgent priority. The Eisenhower administration accepted that Diem required a standing army. Under the New Look security strategy, supporting foreign military forces was deemed more cost-efficient than deploying US troops. At the same time, administration officials were concerned that a too-large Vietnamese army would create an economic strain on American resources, as Eisenhower cautioned Diem during their May 1957 meeting in Washington.36 Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, envisaged the Vietnamese army as a relatively small force for providing a rudimentary defense against armed aggressors. Ultimately, the country’s security would be guaranteed by the American nuclear umbrella and by the armed forces of friendly nations.37 For Diem, the Civil Guard was a way to circumvent Washington’s concerns about the size of the Vietnamese army. In July 1956, the United States had placed a 150,000-man ceiling on the ARVN.38 Turning the Civil Guard into a quasimilitary force would allow Diem to evade this ceiling.39 During his visit with

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Eisenhower, Diem described his goal for the guard in a way that was designed to appeal to the American president, telling him that the guard would serve as Vietnam’s primary internal security force.40 This was disingenuous of Diem, since his real goal was to strengthen the force so that it could carry out military-like operations against armed communists in the countryside. This would relieve the army of its rural security duties and free it to prepare for conventional armed conflict with the North Vietnamese. To help transform the Civil Guard into a more military organization, Diem in 1957 launched a campaign to secure US military assistance for the force. Central to achieving this objective was transferring the guard to the ministry of defense, where it would be eligible for assistance from the MAAG. As long as it remained under the jurisdiction of the office of the presidency, or under the interior ministry, the force could receive aid only from the relatively impecunious US foreign aid agencies and the MSUG. Moving the Civil Guard to the defense ministry, and thereby making the guard eligible for US military assistance, had two important benefits for Diem. First, the MAAG, with far greater resources than the US civilian agencies, would be able to provide the guard with much more training and equipment than was possible under the ICA/MSUG program. Second, with MAAG in charge of supporting the Civil Guard, Diem would be free of meddlesome MSUG police advisors, who were continuing to insist on using the guard as a rural police force. Giving the defense ministry control over the guard would serve other Diem objectives as well. As always, Vietnamese political considerations contributed to Diem’s desire to militarize the guard. The Civil Guard could serve as ‘coup insurance’ against army commanders considering deposing the South Vietnamese leader.41 While the Civil Guard did not ultimately prevent the South Vietnamese military from seizing power in November 1963, the organization did remain loyal to Diem. It proved its utility during the failed army coup of November 1960. A USOM official recalled being awakened early on the morning of the 11th by the sound of gunfire and mounting chaos: ‘The sky was streaked with tracers … and some firing was coming from all sides of the house. Our servants … were running around like chickens in a hailstorm’.42 In the midst of this confusion and danger, members of the Civil Guard, badly outgunned by rebellious paratroopers, sustained heavy casualties fighting to protect Diem.

The MAAG and the Civil Guard The US military personnel responsible for assisting the Vietnamese armed forces shared a number of Diem’s beliefs about what was required to bolster the security of Vietnam. From the earliest days of US assistance to Diem’s military forces, the MAAG believed that the greatest challenge to the South Vietnamese government was military in nature. Specifically, American military officials maintained that a conventional invasion across the seventeenth parallel by Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) forces was Diem’s paramount security threat, although the evidence suggests that Hanoi was in fact extremely wary of any actions that might

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provoke direct US military action.43 In the judgement of successive MAAG leaders, and other senior US military officers, deterring a conventional cross-border communist attack would require more than the US nuclear umbrella. It would be necessary, in their view, to create a modern, well-trained, well-equipped ground force capable of offering serious resistance to a communist thrust into South Vietnam. Toward that end, the MAAG set out to replicate the US army of the period. Under American tutelage and with US material support, Diem acquired a ground force organized, trained and equipped in a ‘mirror image’ of the US army, albeit on a smaller scale, and with divisions that did not include their own armoured vehicles, helicopters or military bands. With a focus on developing a force to resist a DRV invasion, the MAAG program during the 1955–60 period devoted few resources to training the ARVN to defeat guerrilla forces operating in South Vietnam.44 Even as late as 1960, as the communist armed struggle against Diem was underway in earnest, and after five years of US intelligence estimates that correctly downplayed the threat of a conventional invasion, the MAAG remained wedded to replicating US-style conventional forces.45 The MAAG’s ideas about the role of the Civil Guard in maintaining South Vietnam’s security were congruent with Diem’s, although the US military had no particular interest in seeing the guard develop as a counterweight to the Vietnamese army. Like Diem, Lt. General Samuel T. Williams, the MAAG commander from 1955 to 1960, saw the Civil Guard not as an embryonic rural police force, but as a paramilitary adjunct to the ARVN. During the 1955–7 period, the army was the only Vietnamese force capable of maintaining internal security. The Vietnamese military, rather than preparing for what the MAAG considered to be the force’s primary mission, the defense of the country against invasion, was compelled to engage in police-like duties such as guarding convoys, manning checkpoints, and suppressing insurrections.46 The MAAG shared Diem’s hope that the Civil Guard would assume these rural paramilitary responsibilities and in so doing free up the army to concentrate on developing the capabilities to resist a conventional military attack by Hanoi. Under the MAAG’s conception, Vietnam’s security structure would have two primary components. The ARVN would defend against cross-border invasion, while the guard would operate in the countryside suppressing outbreaks of guerrilla violence. Missing from this formulation was the matter of rural law enforcement. Eisenhower administration internal security policy for the developing world recognized that paramilitary organizations would often be needed to conduct pacification missions in areas of guerrilla activity and to suppress large-scale rebellion. At the same time, Eisenhower policy stressed that modern, professional police forces should contribute to the US goal of nation-building. Political, social and economic progress was impossible if lawlessness flourished. If pro-Western regimes were to survive and prosper, they also required public safety organs that could identify and root out subversive elements.47 The MAAG and Diem’s emphasis on using the Civil Guard as a paramilitary adjunct to the ARVN was bound to conflict with MSUG police advisors and other officials

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who, emphasizing the need for nation-building, saw the guard as a nascent rural public safety organization. Administration policy offered no guidance on how to resolve such disputes. Police institutions in Vietnam and elsewhere in the developing world, as defined by Eisenhower policy directives, included a broad array of organizations ranging from regular civil police to paramilitary forces such as constabularies, civil guards and gendarmeries.48 Public safety officials recognized that civil police and paramilitary forces had overlapping responsibilities for internal security.49 But the term ‘internal security’ remained vague and non-specific, and as a result, administration policy gave no real direction to US officials in the field who were struggling to develop organizations like South Vietnam’s Civil Guard. Diem, on the other hand, defined internal security in precise terms. The Vietnamese leader ‘equated the security of the nation with its own safety’, as Robert Scigliano has rightly concluded.50 Any measures that strengthened the ability of his family to maintain political power were good, while anything that challenged the rule of the Ngos was to be resisted. Diem ignored American advice about the need for creating a rural police force, failing to see any connection between the security of the individual Vietnamese citizen and the survival of his regime.51 The problem of persuading an autocratic Asian ruler to accept American reforms was not confined to South Vietnam, as demonstrated by the Eisenhower administration’s struggles with Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan and Syngman Rhee in South Korea.52 Yet American policy offered no direction to US advisors facing a leader who entertained a conception of internal security that focused not on building responsive, professional, non-political police forces, but on the retention of power. Nor did US policy help adjudicate disputes between civilian and military officials who disagreed over roles and missions questions surrounding institutions such as the Civil Guard. As a result, US agencies operating in Vietnam were left to struggle amongst themselves to arrive at a resolution.

The Civil Guard controversy Beginning in 1957, the Civil Guard became the subject of the American internal security assistance program’s most intense and sustained controversy. A series of proposals made by Diem regarding the future of the force led to a bureaucratic stalemate among the US agencies operating in Vietnam, and the temporary cutoff of US support to the guard. Diem’s first proposal was a request for $60 million in new equipment.53 In Diem’s view, the Civil Guard did not have the proper firepower for the paramilitary duties he contemplated for the force, and was under-equipped relative to the Viet Cong. The communists were equipped with automatic weapons, while the guard was armed with nothing more than old French carbines.54 Of greater concern to the Americans was Diem’s plea for more sophisticated weapons, including bazookas, landing craft, light tanks, half-tracks, and helicopters.55 American officials agreed that the Civil Guard needed substantial improvements, both in terms of its training and in its weapons stockpiles. However, the MSUG, USOM and even supporters of Civil Guard militarization in

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the MAAG were troubled by the scale and nature of Diem’s equipment request. Disingenuously, and to the amazement of the Americans, Diem and other South Vietnamese officials argued that the Civil Guard needed the advanced weaponry to carry out its internal security mandate, such as controlling rioters, dispersing mobs and combating other forms of dissidence.56 The MAAG and the MSUG persuaded Diem to reduce his equipment request to $14 million.57 After protracted negotiations, Diem also agreed to abandon his attempt to acquire tanks and other heavy equipment for the guard.58 More dramatic still was Diem’s proposal to shift the Civil Guard to the ministry of defense. The president couched the move in what he termed the ‘New Concept’ for the guard. At first glance, the plan seemed to move the guard in the direction proposed by the MSUG advisors. Under the New Concept, the Civil Guard would for the first time be given powers of arrest, and would have jurisdiction for all civilian law enforcement in areas outside of large towns, which would remain the responsibility of municipal police.59 In reality, however, the Diem plan was an attempt to move the guard closer to his goal of greater militarization. Although Diem officials claimed that the New Concept shifted the Civil Guard from the office of the presidency to the interior ministry, as MSUG officials had long urged, in fact the proposal moved the force under greater defense ministry control. Under the plan, the military would provide equipment and other logistical support to the Civil Guard, and the ministry of defense would control key organizational functions such as the promotion of the guard’s officers.60 Diem’s attempt to place the Civil Guard under ministry of defense jurisdiction alarmed MSUG advisors, USOM, and Elbridge Durbrow, the US ambassador in Saigon from 1958–61.61 American civilian opposition to Diem’s plans rankled the South Vietnamese premier. In private meetings with Williams – apparently unattended by Durbrow or any other US civilians – Diem expressed his annoyance with MSUG advisors and with Leland Barrows, the USOM director. Diem complained to Williams in October 1957 that the MSU police advisors simply did not understand Vietnamese conditions. ‘With all the piracy and terrorism in areas of Vietnam, this was not peace but war’, Diem said. ‘Vietnam’, he added, did not need police organizations such as ‘the ones being used in Michigan’, but rather a paramilitary force under the operational control of the defense ministry.62 Such arguments resonated with the MAAG commander, who was eager to transform the guard into a military-like force to supplement the Vietnamese army. Williams maintained that the ministry of defense was more efficient than any of Vietnam’s civilian agencies, and would be in a better position to support the Civil Guard.63 Like Diem, Williams argued that the MSU police advisors were mistaken in believing that US-style police organizations were appropriate for countryside as dangerous as South Vietnam’s. Williams saw the university as mindlessly obstructionist, mulishly opposing Diem at every turn.64 The civilian police technicians, in Williams’ view, arrogantly and incorrectly assumed that they knew how best to manage Vietnam’s lawless environment. Williams later described a 1957 encounter with a civilian police advisor:

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The US, Diem and the Civil Guard I said, ‘Have you ever been out in the boondocks here, out in the countryside when the Vietnamese and the outlaws were shooting at each other?’ ‘No, sir’. I said, ‘Well, if you’re going down a road in your jeep and a half a dozen men from either side of the road start shooting at you with rifles or throwing grenades, are you going to be able to handle that situation with a sixshooter?’ ‘My every shot will be a dead man’. (Laughter) And you know, everyone on the country team believed that man. Everyone believed that man!65

Durbrow was prepared to take a harder line with the president. Roughly $5 million in equipment was scheduled to be delivered to the Civil Guard in fiscal year 1958 as part of an effort to improve the force. Diem’s attempts to move the Civil Guard to defense ministry jurisdiction, and his continued refusal to accept the embassy’s recommendation to cut the guard to 32,000, prompted an exasperated Durbrow to consider withholding a portion of the scheduled arms transfers. At the same time, however, civilian officials recognized the limits of American leverage and influence. Diem appeared unlikely to back down, and the Americans were left with the unpalatable choice of either accepting the South Vietnamese leader’s concept, or withdrawing US support for the guard. While Durbrow was extremely reluctant to accept the Diem approach, the ambassador believed the embassy would be compelled to do so, since it was essential to improve the Civil Guard’s capabilities as quickly as possible.66 Nevertheless, the ICA, which paid for US assistance to the guard, decided to withhold the transfer of most of the weapons and equipment scheduled to be shipped to the force during fiscal year 1958. Although the ICA operated under the secretary of state’s oversight, the agency was quasi-autonomous, and was thus able to take unilateral actions such as cutting off assistance to foreign governments. A new ICA policy, which permitted the supply of matériel only for training and demonstration purposes, and not simply to replace old weapons inventories, buttressed the foreign aid agency’s decision regarding the Civil Guard.67 ICA’s cut-off of matériel initiated a period of intense conflict among civilian officials, the MAAG, and the Diem government. Holding up the equipment transfers was the bureaucratic equivalent of all-out war, and Diem and the MAAG mounted a campaign to undermine the decision. During April 1958, the MAAG announced it was prepared to assume responsibility for the Civil Guard, and to pay all of the costs for training and equipping the force, a proposal that was eventually rejected.68 Williams also took more dramatic steps to circumvent the weapons embargo. Frustrated by the arms cut-off, Williams simply transferred 5,000 Thompson submachine guns from US military stocks to the Civil Guard.69 Lansdale, then back in Washington serving as deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for special operations, noted approvingly that this ‘back-door delivery’ of weapons gave civil guardsmen a ‘fighting chance for survival’ against the better-armed Vietnamese communists.70 William’s action – probably illegal, and certainly contrary to American policy – earned him nothing more than a letter of reprimand.71 Barrows concluded he could do nothing about William’s unauthorized maneuver.72

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William’s actions, and the lack of significant consequences for the MAAG chief, were a testament to the bureaucratic power enjoyed by the US military in Vietnam during the late 1950s. The vast resources of the US military gave the MAAG considerable bureaucratic clout. During the 1954–62 period, the MAAG oversaw roughly $85 million a year in direct aid to the Vietnamese military.73 Internal security assistance resources at the disposal of the USOM were far smaller. For fiscal year 1957, $5.7 million was programmed for Vietnamese police functions.74 Although this figure would increase over time, MAAG resources always dwarfed the police and paramilitary aid that the USOM oversaw. The MAAG’s bureaucratic power was reflected in the fact that Williams dealt directly with Diem, and sometimes met with the Vietnamese president alone.75 Williams reported not to the US ambassador, ostensibly the senior American official in Vietnam, but to the commander-in-chief, Pacific (CINCPAC) in Hawaii. As a result, the MAAG chief operated relatively autonomously and with little oversight or control by the embassy.76 Beyond complaining to Washington, there was little civilian officials in Saigon could do to control wayward actions by the MAAG. In the face of the growing institutional discord among the Americans, Diem adopted a more conciliatory approach. Sensing the seriousness of the American position, the South Vietnamese leader made a number of concessions. The ministry of defense, his representatives informed Barrows, would have operational control over the Civil Guard only in times of war. In peacetime, the force would report to the secretary of the interior, and it would be responsible for its own training, promotion and logistics.77 This concession contributed to the US decision in early 1959 to renew arms shipments to the Civil Guard. Officials believed that Diem was now committed to keeping the guard a civilian organization. Although he still refused to cut the force, he had made a substantial effort to accommodate other American concerns. Maintaining the embargo, as State Department South East Asia desk officers argued at a January 1959 meeting in Washington, ‘would cause Diem to question seriously our good faith’.78 With Diem on board, at least in some key aspects, the Saigon embassy proposed a new package of assistance. Totalling $18.5 million over a three-year period, the aid was intended to bolster the guard with new training and equipment, thereby giving it the means to cope with Vietnam’s burgeoning internal security problems.79 The renewal of American aid for the Civil Guard represented a substantial victory for Diem. While he conceded, at least temporarily, on the question of civilian control of the guard, Diem was able to get the Americans to resume large-scale funding for the organization, and to do so without the requirement that Diem cut the size of the force. The January 1959 decision also marked the beginning of a broader change in policy that Diem had long sought. Henceforth, US civilian officials would effectively end their insistence that the Civil Guard serve as South Vietnam’s rural police force. MSU, whose advisors had long irritated Diem with their pleas that the guard function as a civilian law enforcement agency, would soon end its association with the Civil Guard. By the end of the decade, the Civil Guard would be brought under the ministry of defense and MAAG umbrella.

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MSUG’s departure In 1959, the ICA, alarmed by the increase in communist violence in the countryside and by continuing poor performance of the Civil Guard and other internal security forces, decided to establish a public safety division (PSD) within the USOM in Saigon.80 Beginning on 1 July, US assistance to the Civil Guard became the responsibility of USOM personnel, and during the next two years, MSUG’s involvement in training for South Vietnam’s police forces would wind down. In June 1962, all of MSU’s training and advisory programs came to an end.81 By the end of the decade, the university was also eager to end its involvement with police assistance in Vietnam. Three factors contributed to MSU’s decision. First, the guard’s growing militarization deeply troubled the MSUG personnel, who were unsettled by an increasingly military environment within what the advisors considered to be civilian police institutions.82 Second, ICA’s decision to establish its own police assistance unit in Saigon meant that USOM would be providing the advice and training that the MSUG had been giving. Third, bureaucratic tension between the university and ICA had increased sharply. As South Vietnam’s internal security situation deteriorated, ICA officials looked for scapegoats, and ‘past accomplishments are being reviewed, inventoried, audited, second-guessed, and criticized’, as an MSUG report noted in 1960.83 ICA officials in Washington, after giving the university relatively free reign during the previous years, had begun to ask pointed questions about the scope of the MSUG’s police training activities, complaining for example that it was impossible to determine how much equipment and other assistance had been given to the Civil Guard or how effective that aid had been.84 Three additional factors caused the university to re-examine its involvement in Vietnam. The first was academic. The MSUG’s activities did not appear to be contributing to the university’s broader educational mission. MSU concluded that ‘action-oriented’ programs such as the Civil Guard training effort ‘do not optimally draw on the University’s competence nor accrue to it the academic enrichment and prestige it should obtain’, a university administrator observed in 1958.85 As assassinations, bombings, and other violence grew during the late 1950s, the university questioned its own ability to supply law-enforcement solutions to the Vietnamese government.86 The university had come to believe, like the ICA, that an academic institution was ill-suited to assist internal security organizations that were confronting a communist insurgency. By 1961, as a full-blown insurgency was underway in South Vietnam, a senior MSUG police advisor admitted that he had second thoughts about the university’s insistence on civilian police role for the Civil Guard: I am not certain whether I would have agreed in 1958 or 1959 that the Civil Guard should have been transferred to the military forces of Vietnam, but I certainly would have modified its training and provided the arms and equipment necessary to cope with the Viet Cong.87

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Finally, the autocratic nature of the South Vietnamese regime, and the university’s role in working to strengthen Diem’s repressive apparatus, also disturbed a number of MSUG advisors and university officials in East Lansing.88 While eager to fight communism, they were at the same time firm believers in democracy, the rule of law, and social and economic progress. During the early years of MSU’s involvement in South Vietnam, the university advisors could claim plausibly that Diem was an anti-communist nationalist who was seeking to build a politically, socially and economically progressive alternative to the communist regime in North Vietnam. By the late 1950s, however, Diem had revealed himself as a tyrannical figure willing to do almost anything to retain his grip on power. The MSUG advisors, like many other liberals who had supported Diem, began to turn against the South Vietnamese leader.89 The university claimed that its activities in Vietnam were hampered by a lack of experience in advising foreign governments, arguing that university personnel, like other Americans, had little background in working abroad on sensitive security matters.90 In fact, Americans did have such experience. Although the context was different, the United States in occupied Japan and Germany worked closely with local officials to remold security institutions. More recently, the United States had launched internal security assistance programs in a score of countries. The real problem was the mindset the MSUG advisors brought to Vietnam. The university’s determination reflected the MSUG’s theoretical approach to South Vietnam. Although not addressing the MSUG specifically, R.B. Smith is correct in concluding that under the American advisory approach during the Diem era, practical problems were ‘defined in methodological terms and appropriate solutions devised’.91 Along with the Eisenhower administration – and indeed, much of elite American opinion during this period – MSU personnel believed that replicating American institutions in countries like Vietnam would contribute to nation-building and, ultimately, strengthen the ranks of the noncommunist world. The difficulty was that the university’s conceptions were ‘undependable guides to action’, as two former MSUG advisors later acknowledged.92 In implementing their abstractions, the university ignored the harsh realities of Vietnamese politics, society and history, as demonstrated in the MSUG’s schemes for re-organizing the guard.

The MAAG takes over With MSUG out of the picture, the burden for strengthening the Civil Guard now rested solely on the US government. The conception of the guard as a rural police force was abandoned. The American focus was now on building what Williams and the MAAG had long urged – an anti-guerrilla force that could engage and defeat communist units in the countryside. Diem renewed pressure to move the guard to the ministry of defense. Any shortfalls in the force, he told USOM, were attributable to American officials who resisted the transfer.93 In Washington, Diem’s pleas found a sympathetic audience.

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With the continued growth of communist guerrilla strength in South Vietnam, senior administration officials concluded that the MAAG had to take charge of the force. ‘There is now agreement in the US government that MAAG should take over responsibility for the Civil Guard’, C. Douglas Dillon, the undersecretary of state, announced at the NSC meeting on 21 September 1960.94 Diem received a green light to place the guard under military jurisdiction, and on 3 December he issued a decree that transferred the force from the interior ministry to the ministry of defense, with training and equipment provided by the MAAG.95 The MAAG leadership quickly worked to turn the Civil Guard into a junior version of the ARVN. Lt. General Lionel C. McGarr, who replaced Williams as the MAAG commander on 1 September, declared that the guardsmen had to become what he termed ‘well-disciplined, well-motivated soldier[s] … conditioned to hardship’, and he announced that henceforth, all of the Civil Guard’s training would be military.96 McGarr arrived in Vietnam with a reputation as something of a counter-guerrilla expert, having overseen studies on unconventional warfare while serving as commandant of the US Army’s Command and General Staff College.97 As the MAAG leader, McGarr appeared at first to embrace the counter-insurgency theory that would become so fashionable during the Kennedy administration. McGarr insisted that defeating the communists required an integrated political-military strategy that aimed to build popular support for the Diem regime.98 Such an approach, he told Wesley Fishel, the former MSUG chief advisor, was the ‘ultimate solution’ to South Vietnam’s security problems.99 In reality, McGarr, like Williams, took an essentially conventional military approach to South Vietnam’s security. Senior US army leaders did not entirely ignore the threat posed by guerrilla war in Vietnam and elsewhere in the developing world, but neither did they believe it demanded new and innovative military countermeasures. As General George Decker, the army’s chief of staff from 1960 to 1962, reportedly told President Kennedy, ‘any good soldier can handle guerrillas’.100 Although claiming to support the use of non-military instruments to win the rural population away from the Viet Cong – what would later be termed the ‘hearts and minds’ approach – McGarr believed that the insurgency had grown to the point where military countermeasures were of paramount importance. Lingering amid McGarr’s perceptions was the specter of a conventional invasion by Hanoi. Although US intelligence estimates downplayed the possibility, the specter of a cross-border attack continued to shape the MAAG’s threat assessments, planning, and training program for the Vietnamese.101 Bringing the Civil Guard under the MAAG umbrella led to significant increases in resources for the force. Under a Counter-insurgency Plan (CIP) drawn up by the Saigon embassy and the MAAG and approved by the new Kennedy administration in January 1961, the Civil Guard for the first time would receive military assistance funds. Military aid, far more lavish than anything the ICA could provide, permitted the use of US military training personnel, and the creation of new Civil Guard training centers. Generous military assistance supported expansion of the guard to a force of 68,000.102 Reflecting the US Army’s

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dominant ‘any good soldier can handle guerrillas’ philosophy, MAAG training for the Civil Guard would be essentially conventional in nature, with little emphasis on developing specialized counter-guerrilla skills.103 Although Dillon had informed his colleagues that they could expect to see the guard’s transformation into an effective anti-guerrilla force within three months, progress remained elusive.104 The long-familiar shortfalls – poor leadership, morale, and discipline – remained.105 During the previous five years, US civilian and military officials and university advisors had squabbled among themselves and with Diem over the Civil Guard’s roles and missions. Now that the guard had been thoroughly militarized, new roles and missions problems emerged. The MAAG discovered that the guard, which they had expected to serve as an antiguerrilla force, was in fact being deployed to conduct a hotchpotch of missions. The South Vietnamese used the Civil Guard at border posts to defend against conventional aggression, to conduct vice raids, and as regular combat troops.106 Militarizing the guard solved none of Vietnam’s military or internal security problems. With the Civil Guard now serving as a military adjunct to the ARVN, civilian law enforcement was left to the country’s municipal police forces. The police, however, were confined to the cities, and a law enforcement vacuum remained.107 At the same time, the guard’s poor performance dashed the MAAG’s hopes for relieving the ARVN of its internal security role, and with it, the possibility of reducing the size of the Vietnamese army. The Civil Guard’s inadequacies, together with the continuing growth of the communist insurgency, would contribute to the Kennedy administration’s 1961 decision to increase the 150,000-man ceiling on South Vietnamese armed forces by 20,000.108

Conclusion In July 1960, an American diplomat in Saigon, noting Diem’s incessant requests for US matériel, and his frequent disregard for American advice, complained that the South Vietnamese leader treated the United States ‘as a quartermaster rather than a partner in a most important undertaking’.109 Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, was openly contemptuous of his country’s American patrons, observing on one occasion that the regime’s adversaries included ‘not only Communists but foreigners who claim to be our friends’.110 Diem himself was less dismissive of the Americans. Nevertheless, in the case of the Civil Guard, attempting to refashion the force proved to be a deeply frustrating experience for the MSUG police advisors. The Civil Guard episode, along with the university’s endeavours to reform the Sûreté, illustrated the difficulty in persuading a recalcitrant ally to accept American notions about what was required to establish internal security. The MSUG’s abstract remedies for the Civil Guard were ‘undependable guides to action’ that conflicted with Diem’s internal political calculations. The university’s vision for the Civil Guard also met opposition from the MAAG. The MSUG approach was based on the premise that the guard should serve as Vietnam’s rural law enforcement force. As one MSUG advisor argued in 1959, the Civil Guard’s potential was as an instrument to ‘win the villages with

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police diligence’. The MAAG, in working to militarize the guard, was helping to forfeit that potential. As an adjunct to the ARVN, the advisor continued, the guard would do little more than ‘chase a few Viet Minh who almost seem like phantoms’.111 To Williams, such arguments were evidence that the MSUG were nothing more than ‘police types who don’t see the big picture’.112 The MAAG proved to be a powerful bureaucratic adversary for the police-oriented civilians, and Williams’ conception prevailed. The frustrations associated with reforming the Civil Guard and other internal security organizations led MSU to question its role in South Vietnam. On one level, the MSUG was finally overwhelmed by the country’s security challenges. Providing the advice and training the MSUG deemed essential proved too difficult in an environment as turbulent as Diem’s South Vietnam. More broadly, the Civil Guard episode drove the university to reconsider its own role in supporting American policy abroad. The Cold War imperative had led the university to Saigon in the mid-1950s. But by the end of the decade, MSU concluded that its assistance to Diem’s repressive regime conflicted with older liberal American values.

5

John F. Kennedy, foreign internal security assistance, and the challenge of ‘subterranean war’

Introduction Defeating communist revolution in the developing world was a central goal of the Kennedy administration. In Kennedy’s view, the Eisenhower era had been a time of national torpor, ‘[e]ight gray years … of drift, of falling behind, of postponing decisions and crises’.1 To Kennedy, Eisenhower had neglected the entire spectrum of challenges to American security, from the nuclear arms race to the Soviet conventional military threat in Europe to so-called ‘brush-fire’ wars in the developing world. In Kennedy’s judgement, what he termed ‘wars of subversion’ posed a particular danger.2 Under the administration’s counter-insurgency strategy, the United States used military assistance, foreign aid, diplomacy, intelligence operations, and assistance to foreign police and paramilitary forces to control instability and subversion and combat communist guerrillas. The Kennedy program had much in common with Eisenhower’s approach to fighting subversion and insurgency. What was different under Kennedy was the urgency with which the United States pursued its counter-insurgency objectives, the truly global nature of the American effort, and the new role for the US army’s Special Forces in training local military forces to defeat indirect communist aggression. The theoretical underpinnings of the Kennedy program also distinguished it from Eisenhower’s. Kennedy’s in-house intellectuals served as transmission belts for modernization theory, which appeared to offer an all-encompassing explanation for the turbulence in the developing world. To Kennedy, modernization theory had more than explanatory power. It also suggested a course of action for countering the ‘wars of national liberation’ advocated by Moscow. Foreign internal security assistance, as a component of counter-insurgency, reflected tenets of modernization theory. Central to that theory was a belief in the importance of strengthening institutions of the state. As articulated by administration strategists, the role of police and paramilitary forces was to expand the presence of the state, and to shield fragile institutions from communist subversion during the difficult transition to modernity. America, according to modernization theory, was at the pinnacle of the global development process, and thus its institutions, including the police, would for the Kennedy administration serve as the model for less-developed regions of the world.

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Kennedy and his lieutenants suspected correctly that the US foreign aid bureaucracy, which managed most of Washington’s foreign policy assistance, did not share the administration’s enthusiasm for counter-insurgency oriented foreign internal security assistance. Questions of bureaucratic structure fascinated Kennedy’s advisors, who brought to government a faith in managerial expertise that was pronounced in American society during the early 1960s. However, in their eagerness to re-organize the police assistance bureaucracy, administrators overlooked more fundamental problems with US internal security policy. Specifically, these officials did not consider the formidable obstacles to imposing the American police model on fractious and unstable Third World governments.

Kennedy as leader The man who assumed the presidency in January 1961 presented an image of high intelligence, youthful good looks, and dynamic action. With a glamorous and sophisticated wife at his side, John F. Kennedy was the antithesis of the dowdy Eisenhowers. After eight years under relatively colorless leadership, the country seemed ready to face what Kennedy called the ‘New Frontier’. The American people, he announced during a campaign stop the previous September, ‘are disturbed by the relative decline in our vitality and prestige, and they have the will and the strength to start the United States moving again’.3 Kennedy pledged economic growth, civil rights for African-Americans, and improved education at home.4 In foreign policy, Kennedy offered an ambitious and self-confident agenda – to rebuild American military power and to defeat communist revolution, to spread economic development and democracy to the Third World, and to control nuclear weapons. It was the hour of ‘maximum danger’, he intoned during his inaugural address. Humanity held the power to destroy all life on the planet, but at the same time, ‘man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty’.5 The first accounts of the Kennedy presidency, many of which were written by former administration officials, reinforced the image the late president had sought to convey.6 The fallen leader was depicted in heroic and world-historic terms – supremely cool and pragmatic in his defense of the American national interest, who at the same time served as an instrument of social change on a global scale. Failures, such as the Bay of Pigs, were attributed to Eisenhower policies Kennedy was powerless to change.7 During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a harsher view of the Kennedy administration emerged. Writing during a period of bitter discord over the Vietnam War, revisionists assigned much of the blame for America’s involvement in South East Asia to policies begun under Kennedy.8 These writers characterized Kennedy’s leadership as arrogant and deceitful, motivated by narrow political calculations rather than a proper consideration of US national values and interests. Other revisionists depicted the president as an arch-Cold Warrior whose obsession with demonstrating ‘toughness’ brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation

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in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis.9 During the 1980s and 1990s, Kennedy revisionists devoted much attention to the president’s colorful personal life, arguing that his sexual escapades, ties with the criminal underworld, and serious physical ailments put his presidency at risk and in so doing, jeopardized American national security.10 As Kennedy’s reputation declined among historians, Eisenhower’s rose. During the 1980s, a number of scholars revised the earlier image of Eisenhower as an amiable but detached fumbler bewildered by the demands of the Cold War. Eisenhower was instead depicted as a shrewd defender of US interests who skilfully avoided American military intervention in Indochina, the Taiwan Strait, and Berlin.11 More recently, post-revisionists have presented a more critical approach to the Eisenhower presidency. While recognizing Eisenhower as an able statesmen, these historians have faulted the president for weak leadership on issues such as Vietnam.12 More balanced and nuanced accounts of Kennedy’s leadership have also emerged. Scholars have moved beyond sweeping attacks on the administration, and have sought to understand the complexity of Kennedy’s position as a Cold War leader.13 Kennedy, in the view of the neo-revisionists, was neither the colossus depicted by his early admirers, nor the feckless playboy described by his detractors.14 Historians have continued to criticize the president’s militant anti-communism as an obstacle to improved relations with the developing world, his fixation on the regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and his policies that ensnared the United States in South Vietnam.15 At the same time, historians have acknowledged Kennedy’s deeply held sympathy toward nationalist aspirations in the Third World, his commitment to international negotiation, particularly in the area of nuclear weapons, and progressive foreign policy initiatives, such as the Peace Corps.16

Kennedy, communism and the Third World During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy charged that Eisenhower’s frugality had forced the United States to build intercontinental ballistic missiles at a far slower pace than the Soviet Union, thus creating a ‘missile gap’.17 Kennedy also criticized the Eisenhower doctrine of ‘massive retaliation’, under which the United States would deter large-scale conventional attacks by retaining what John Foster Dulles called ‘the capacity to hit an aggressor [with nuclear weapons] where it hurts, at times and places of our own choosing’.18 Kennedy charged that such an approach hamstrung the president, leaving him with the unacceptable choice of ‘suicide or surrender’ should deterrence fail.19 Under the new administration’s ‘flexible response’ strategy, Kennedy sought greater flexibility by developing the means to respond to all levels of aggression, from guerrilla war to conventional conflict to nuclear attack.20 Creating more room for maneuver on the world stage would be a prominent if elusive goal for the administration. During the Kennedy presidency, the United States would become ensnared in a whole range of deeper commitments to anti-communist regimes, most notably in Vietnam.

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More broadly, Kennedy alleged that his predecessor had allowed the United States to languish while the Soviet Union grew stronger. The second Eisenhower administration had been rocked by a series of crises – over the offshore islands in the Taiwan strait, the Congo, Berlin, the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite, the shooting down of the U-2 spy plane, to mention but a few – and in the zero-sum mentality of the high Cold War period, this development seemed to auger a shift in the balance of power in favor of the communist world. As Kennedy told a Democratic party gathering in 1959, the Soviets ‘beat us into outer space. They beat us around the sun. They beat us to the moon. Half of Indochina has disappeared behind the Iron Curtain’.21 Kennedy also characterized Eisenhower’s approach to the developing world as misguided. In the new president’s view, nationalism was among the most powerful political forces operating in the world. Kennedy charged that his predecessor had ignored legitimate nationalist aspirations, and had wrongly deprived neutral or non-aligned nations of US foreign assistance. Kennedy insisted that American foreign aid should not hinge on whether a given country supported the United States, but on whether that nation was seeking to enhance its own freedom.22 Critics argued that foreign assistance under Eisenhower had been too fragmented, too modest, and directed too narrowly toward short-term foreign policy objectives.23 What was needed, in their view, was an aid program that focused on the long-term development of the Third World that would jump-start local economies and allow them to ‘take off’ and become self-sustaining. Sympathetic accounts of the Kennedy presidency would claim foreign aid initiatives such as the Alliance for Progress in Latin America as major administration successes. In fact, Eisenhower and Dulles had been strong advocates of foreign assistance. Throughout the Eisenhower years, the White House fought foreign aid opponents in Congress, and under Eisenhower, the United States laid the groundwork for a sustained program of economic and social assistance to Central and South America.24 Kennedy also shared many of his predecessor’s assumptions about the nature of the communist challenge in the developing world. Like Eisenhower, Kennedy believed that the central arena of competition between communism and the free world had shifted from Europe to Africa, Asia and Latin America. The process of de-colonialization was well underway, and it had created vast new zones of instability that were vulnerable to communist penetration and exploitation.25 Like Eisenhower, Kennedy maintained that Moscow and Beijing were seeking to strengthen their international positions by pursuing a strategy of subversion, indirect warfare, and agitation designed to install communist regimes in the developing world. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy announced that the United States must be prepared to meet ‘the determined Soviet program for world domination – a program which skilfully blends the weapons of military might, political subversion, economic penetration and ideological conquest’.26 The security of the West, Kennedy told Congress in March 1961, was slowly being ‘nibbled away at the periphery’ by the forces of ‘subversion, infiltration, intimidation, indirect or non-overt aggression, internal

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revolution, diplomatic blackmail, guerrilla warfare or a series of limited wars’.27 In South East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, pro-Western regimes were engaged in protracted struggles with guerrilla movements.

Castro’s Cuba While most of the post-war insurgencies had in fact made few concrete gains, there were some important exceptions, such as Algeria, South Vietnam, and most significantly, Cuba. In a country a mere ninety miles from the tip of Florida, Fidel Castro had come to power and revealed himself as a committed Marxist-Leninist. Although Theodore C. Sorensen, a Kennedy speechwriter and confidante, claims that Kennedy regarded Castro as little more than a ‘bearded nuisance’, the Cuban leader was in fact an obsession for the president and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, as the administration’s many plots and covert operations designed to remove Castro attest.28 Pronouncements from the Kremlin heightened the administration’s anxiety about communist-inspired subversion in general, and Cuba in particular. Nikita Khrushchev’s January 1961 speech, in which the Soviet premier pledged continued communist support for ‘wars of national liberation’ against Western imperialism troubled President Kennedy profoundly. In fact, Soviet support for insurgencies in the developing world was typically more rhetorical than material. For all of Khrushchev’s bluster, the Soviet Union had been relatively cautious about giving real assistance to the forces waging wars of national liberation. In the case of Cuba, Moscow had in fact provided no arms or other assistance to Castro’s guerrilla forces.29 Although Eisenhower reportedly dismissed Khrushchev’s remarks as old hat, the president-elect took Khrushchev’s new call to arms at face value and urged his senior advisors to ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest’ the Soviet leader’s exhortation.30 Two other factors dominated Kennedy’s perceptions of the Cuban threat. First, Kennedy feared that the Castro regime’s ties to the Soviet Union posed a threat to security in the region.31 The president was concerned that the island might serve as Moscow’s ‘bridgehead’ in the hemisphere, according to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who served as a special assistant in the Kennedy White House.32 The president’s brother shared the belief that Castro posed a grave security threat. As the attorney general explained in a memorandum to the president following the shambolic Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, Cuba was in danger of becoming ‘a major military arsenal for all of the activities of the Communist Bloc in the Western Hemisphere’.33 Second, Kennedy believed that ‘Castroism’ and the Cuban revolution could serve as a model for other revolutionaries across Latin America. While sympathetic to Third World nationalist aspirations, Kennedy’s anti-communism proved to be a stronger impulse. In his view, anti-colonial movements, while often driven by legitimate grievances, were always vulnerable to manipulation by communist elements. For Kennedy, Cuba confirmed that legitimate revolutions could be hijacked by Marxist-Leninist elements. Moreover, throughout his

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presidency, Kennedy remained acutely sensitive to the Republican party’s charge that the Democrats under Truman had ‘lost’ China and lacked the motivation to resist communist aggression.34 This factor, combined with his narrow electoral victory in 1960, reinforced Kennedy’s innate political caution and reduced his willingness to take the political dangers associated with supporting nationalist movements that had the potential of being subverted by communist cadres. Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy’s defense secretary, told Congress in 1975 that ‘we [in the administration] were hysterical about Castro’. But in at least one important respect Kennedy’s fears had merit.35 In 1962, Castro allowed Cuba to serve as a launching pad for Moscow’s intermediate-range ballistic missiles, thus contributing to the Cold War’s gravest crisis. At the same time, however, the Kennedy administration’s anxieties about Cuba’s ability to spread revolution were exaggerated. In reality, Castro’s capacity to export revolution abroad would prove to be quite limited, as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimates revealed at the time. Cuban attempts to exploit volatile conditions in Latin America ‘by means of subversion and sabotage have not produced significant results’, the agency concluded in November 1962.36 As Stephen G. Rabe has concluded, Washington ignored factors working against the spread of Cuban-style revolution to the rest of Latin America, such as deeply held nationalist and anti-communist beliefs, and ‘ultimately discounted nuanced analyses of insurrection … and trusted in their fears’.37 Senior national security officials shared the president’s views on communism and the developing world.38 The men who would shape the Kennedy administration’s approach to defeating communist subversion abroad were World War II veterans who had distinguished themselves in post-war academia, business or government service. Like the president, all were highly intelligent and self-confident pragmatists who prized ‘toughness’, verbal dexterity, a quick grasp of the issues, and rationalistic approaches to problem-solving. Dean Rusk, a Rhodes Scholar who had served as an assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs during the Korean war, was named secretary of state. McNamara, a Harvard Business School graduate who had only recently assumed the presidency of Ford Motors, left Detroit to join the administration. McGeorge Bundy, former dean of the faculty at Harvard, was appointed national security advisor. General Maxwell D. Taylor, a former army chief of staff and the author of an influential critique of Eisenhower’s defense policy, became the president’s personal military advisor, and later, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.39 Other officials farther down in the national security hierarchy would also play an influential role in creating administration policy for meeting the communist threat in the Third World. Roger Hilsman, a veteran of guerrilla campaigns in the China–Burma–India theatre during World War II who earned a PhD in political science at Yale, became director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Walt W. Rostow, a Rhodes Scholar and economic historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) joined the administration as Bundy’s deputy, although he would soon be moved over to the State Department

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to chair the Policy Planning Council. Finally, Robert W. Komer, an ex-CIA analyst and Harvard Business School graduate, joined Bundy’s office to manage a portfolio of Third World issues. With his team in place, Kennedy moved swiftly to re-organize the White House policy-making apparatus. These changes reflected Kennedy’s off-the-cuff style, a confidence in his own decision-making ability, and a disdain for formal structures. Kennedy had long viewed the US national security bureaucracies with contempt, its ranks filled with plodding time-servers who, absent a firm White House hand, were incapable of decisive action.40 Kennedy was particularly underwhelmed by the State Department, which he likened to ‘a bowl of jelly’.41 Eager to preserve maximum flexibility and to avoid becoming ensnared in options framed by the bureaucracy, Kennedy functioned as his own secretary of state.42 Although the new president had no managerial experience, he was convinced that Eisenhower’s overly complex administrative apparatus had hamstrung foreign policy-making.43 Kennedy cleared away the bureaucratic thickets that had grown up under Eisenhower, primarily by reducing the size of the White House National Security Council (NSC) staff and abolishing what Hilsman called ‘the heavy undergrowth of interdepartmental committees’ such as the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB).44 The short, sharp National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM), a tightly focused and operationally oriented document signed by the president or the national security advisor, replaced the exhaustive statements of policy favored by the previous White House.45

Meeting the challenge of ‘subterranean war’ The communist threat in the developing world was an urgent priority for the new president. As Kennedy reportedly asked his advisors in the first days of his administration, ‘what are we doing about guerrilla warfare?’46 Administration officials used a variety of terms to describe the forms of conflict underway in the southern hemisphere. The president spoke of ‘guerrilla warfare’, ‘subterranean war’, ‘internal war’, ‘indirect conflict’, and of course, ‘insurgency’.47 Although the words were different, the concepts underlying them were essentially the same. The United States was confronting ‘the entire field of civil disturbance short of the outbreak of civil or limited war within a nation’s territory’, the Policy Planning Council concluded in March 1961. These disturbances ran across a spectrum ranging from riots and mass demonstrations to terrorism and subversion to, at the high end of the conflict scale, guerrilla warfare – in other words, all forms of politically motivated violence below the level of conventional military combat.48 Although the administration viewed insurgency as a new and uniquely demanding problem, the United States had fought communist guerrillas throughout the post-war period. Nor was the Kennedy administration’s strategy for combating such insurgents entirely new. Although the term ‘counter-insurgency’ was a New Frontier neologism, many of the ideas associated with it had been in circulation since the late 1950s. In 1959, the President’s Committee to Study the

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United States Military Assistance Program (better known as the Draper Committee) articulated a political-military strategy for defeating communistinspired guerrilla warfare and insurrection.49 Indeed, the modern US concept of counter-insurgency – that is, political, economic and military measures designed to defeat communist guerrillas – while most often associated with the Kennedy administration, had its origins in the late 1940s and early 1950s.50 Insurgencies in Greece, the Philippines, Indochina and Malaya drew the attention of Truman administration decision-makers, who feared that such conflicts augured a new kind of warfare that threatened to sweep away the hard-won gains of the Second World War.51 As the NSC declared in a policy statement in May 1951, ‘[c]ommunist-controlled guerrilla warfare represents one of the most potent instrumentalities in the arsenal of communist aggression on a world-wide basis’.52 National security officials searched for ways to meet the threats posed by such guerrilla movements, and attempted to draw on the experience of close allies who had waged counter-insurgent operations in their colonies and other areas.53 What was new was the enthusiasm with which the Kennedy administration embraced the challenge of insurgency, the self-conscious attempt to create a formal doctrine for conducting counter-insurgency, and the sustained and global nature of the US commitment to stemming rebellion and revolution. In the words of Charles Maechling, Jr., who served as a State Department counter-insurgency planner under Kennedy, the administration’s program represented ‘the first systematic US government effort to come to grips with the problem’ of insurgency.54 Most dramatically, the administration expanded and redirected the Special Forces (the so-called ‘Green Berets’) to conduct counter-insurgency training and smallscale operations. Assistance to foreign internal security forces – defined by the administration as civil police forces, paramilitary civilian police units, gendarmeries, constabularies and civil guards – became an important component of Kennedy’s counter-insurgency strategy.55 However, there was much continuity between administrations. White House officials charged that Eisenhower officials had neglected the foreign police programs, and under Kennedy, they were expanded. In operational terms, however, little changed. As during the Eisenhower era, Washington sent American advisors abroad to train civilian forces in investigative techniques, administration, crowd control, and other skills, albeit on a broader scale. As under Eisenhower, such assistance was expected to contribute to nation-building in the developing world. Finally, Kennedy, like Eisenhower, saw internal security as a primarily local responsibility. As with his predecessor, Kennedy sought to avoid the commitment of US troops, preferring instead to support indigenous forces. The largest changes between the administrations were administrative and rhetorical in nature. The police assistance bureaucracy was excoriated and re-organized, and as part of the broader program of counter-insurgency, internal security assistance was given a new theoretical cast.

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The role of modernization theory Although impatient with windy theorizing, Kennedy was also a supreme pragmatist who recognized that ideas discussed in university seminar rooms could sometimes be employed to solve practical problems.56 To bolster his cerebral public image, and to create an in-house cadre of useful thinkers, Kennedy brought into his administration policy-oriented ‘action intellectuals’ like Bundy and Rostow.57 Rostow brought from academia a theoretical framework for explaining the turbulence in the developing world. Rostow’s modernization theories resonated with Kennedy, and had a direct impact on his thinking about the communist challenge in the Third World.58 International relations theorists, working within the dominant realist paradigm, maintained that competition between the superpowers remained the principle feature of world politics.59 However, given the growth of nuclear and conventional arsenals, direct military confrontation between the West and the communist bloc had become too risky. In this condition of stalemate, succinctly characterized by Raymond Aron as ‘paix impossible, guerre improbable’, guerrilla warfare represented a relatively low-risk outlet for the continuing struggle for power between the United States and its communist adversaries.60 ‘[I]rregular warfare has become the safest method of waging war against the West’, according to a representative theorist from this period.61 Scholars working in the new field of political development sought to discover links between political violence, modernization, and security challenges for the United States in the developing world. While teaching at MIT, Rostow had identified a unilinear progression of societies from primitive to modern, with the United States sitting at the apex of development. In his influential Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), Rostow described developing nations as being uniquely vulnerable to the stratagems of subversive communist elements. In his words, communism was to be seen as ‘a kind of disease which can befall a transitional society if it fails to organize effectively those elements within it which are prepared to get on with the job of modernization’.62 Communists, he later declared, were the ‘scavengers of the modernization process’.63 According to Rostow, foreign aid, properly applied, could hasten the transition to modernity, and help the developing nations ‘take off’ into the stratosphere of economic growth. In jump-starting Third World economies, the United States would thus reduce the time in which these countries were vulnerable to communist strategems. Embedded within Rostow’s approach was a set of assumptions about the nature of modernity and the ability of the United States to speed up its emergence in the Third World. The notion that development moved in a straight progression, to everhigher levels of order, was an axiom of modernization theory. While such development was good – even essential – violent social change and revolution were rejected as both unnecessary and conducive to exploitation by communists and other radicals.64 The proper model for change in the developing world, in their view, was the gradualism of John Locke rather than the violent upheaval of Karl Marx.65

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Modernization also entailed increasing the power and presence of indigenous state institutions. Almost all of the writers theorizing on political development during the late 1950s and early 1960s believed that modernization involved increasing ‘governmental capacity, authority, and power to penetrate, regulate, and draw resources from society’, as Robert A. Packenham has noted.66 Toward that end, Packenham continues, Third World states needed to focus on developing their ‘civil bureaucracy [and the] administrative capacity to maintain law and order and to perform governmental output functions rationally, neutrally, and efficiently’.67 Finally, these social scientists were supremely confident in the ability of the US government to refashion countries in the developing world and create institutions that would ensure their progress to modernity.68 The typical social scientist of this period, Leo Strauss observed, sought to ‘force these societies into the Procrustean bed of his conceptual scheme’.69 This impulse, although it was to reach an apogee under Kennedy, had deep historical roots. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, missionaries and crusading imperialists had sought to uplift dark-skinned people in Latin America and Asia through the imposition of American values and institutions.70 The American urge to transform indigenous populations along Western lines had obvious parallels with France’s mission civilatrice in Asia and Africa. In keeping with the behavioural and scientistic fashions of the day, the approach of the modernization theorists was highly abstract and theoretical, with little empirical grounding.71 This lack of focus on the particular, and the nearly complete disregard of historical variables, was not seen as a shortcoming, since the theorizing was presumed to have universal applicability. Such a stance embodied what Michael Oakeshott derided as the political rationalist’s belief that ‘the remedy for any particular ill is as universal in its application as it is rational in its conception’.72 Much of political development theory was a mirror image of the unilinear, universalistic Marxism Rostow’s ‘non-communist manifesto’ sought to refute.73 Local political conditions and the cut-and-thrust of grubby retail politics could be safely disregarded. Modernization theorists confidently dismissed ordinary political behavior as mere ‘epiphenomena’ of more enduring underlying social and cultural patterns.74 Regional specialization was in fact seen as a handicap, and area specialists were brushed aside as provincial and insufficiently ‘scientific’ in their approach.75 This attitude was reflected in the behavior of Rostow who, while serving in the State Department, adamantly refused to receive ‘particularistic’ briefings, even on countries as complex as South Vietnam and China.76 For their part, political development specialists were eager to do more than ivory-tower theorizing. As one academic mused, if World War I could be considered the ‘chemists’ war’, and World War II the ‘physicists’ war’, then the current global struggle against communism might properly be dubbed the ‘social scientists’ war’.77 Political scientists, economists, psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists clambered to offer their services to Pentagon, State Department and CIA officials eager to understand the nature of conflict in the developing world

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and what was required to stem it.78 Social science, according to a 1963 study prepared under US Navy auspices, was particularly useful in helping embattled Third World governments create police and paramilitary forces. ‘Social science research’, according to the report, ‘is in a strong position to contribute useful knowledge in designing and developing internal security forces’.79 Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation in 1961 is best remembered for its warning about an emerging ‘military-industrial complex’. Recalled less often are Eisenhower’s words of caution about the threat posed to academic freedom by the ties between universities and the state.80 The challenges of the Cold War helped cement the government–university partnership.81 Michigan State University (MSU) had taken the government–university nexus to a new level of intimacy by directly providing assistance to police and paramilitary forces in South Vietnam. The relationship symbolized the blurring of a previously well-defined distinction between academic and official activities. MIT’s physical scientists and engineers had long been in service to the Cold War state, and now the university’s social scientists were eager to contribute its intellectual resources to the global struggle against communism.82 MIT faculty, like Rostow and Carl Kaysen, joined the NSC staff, while others, like Ithiel de Sola Pool, served as consultants to the government. Reflecting the intellectual optimism of the time, social scientists believed that their notions, properly applied, would pay rich dividends in short order. The prevailing mood, according to George Ball, Rusk’s undersecretary, was one of self-assuredness. Third World countries, under the tutelage of American experts, ‘would build a whole multitude of new Jerusalems’.83 The social engineering devised by academic experts was also intended to deal with the harsher aspects of modernization. Specifically, it was designed to play a direct role in thwarting insurgency, which theorists had identified as a by-product of the political development process. Eisenhower had warned about the influence of the state on academia, but during the Kennedy administration, social scientists would demonstrate the ability of the university to sway the government.

From theory to policy While serving at the Policy Planning Council, Rostow became the administration’s leading authority on guerrilla warfare. Together with Hilsman, Rostow helped fashion a set of policies intended to improve America’s ability to combat insurgency and subversion. State Department officials were eager to exploit research on ‘political change’ that been underway at American universities since the late 1950s.84 But with activist social scientists like Rostow in power, modernization theorizers already had such intellectual transmission belts in place. During the first eighteen months of the administration, Rostow and Hilsman mapped out the broad contours of the Kennedy approach to the problem of insurgency and instability in the developing world. United States security, in their view, hinged on America’s ability to protect the development process currently underway in the Third World, which was threatened by communist exploitation.

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Throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America, according to Hilsman, nationalist movements were ripe for communist exploitation, as were ‘democratic nationalist’ regimes, against which Moscow and its allies were directing ‘efforts along the entire spectrum of subversion’.85 Indeed, the communist threat to modernizing Third World states was virtually unlimited, since in Hilsman’s words, ‘it would be mistake to think that guerrillas cannot thrive where governments are popular and where … economic development and reform are going forward’.86 In keeping with the fashionable political development theories of the day, Hilsman identified the lack of state presence and authority as a key contributor to underdevelopment and, by extension, communist forays. A state that was a ‘weak and distant entity’ would be less likely to resist instability and communist subversion. Enfeebled state institutions, according to Hilsman, invited widespread lawlessness, banditry and insecurity, which further eroded a regime’s authority, thus creating conditions ideal for communist exploitation. Capable and modern internal security forces, in his view, were a critical instrument for increasing state presence and preventing the emergence of a communist subversive threat. In East Africa, for example, a relatively small, Western-trained police force prevented the emergence of what he called a ‘pseudopopular manifestation of discontent’ that presumably threatened the development process.87 Preventing the emergence of full-blown insurgency was of critical importance for Kennedy’s national security strategists. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the administration had concluded that it was extremely difficult to unseat a national liberation movement that had come to power.88 Forestalling insurgency by attacking its roots and early manifestations was thus far preferable to confronting a full-blown guerrilla movement or confronting a new ‘Castroist’ regime. The doctrines articulated by Rostow and Hilsman became enshrined in the Kennedy administration’s most formal articulation of counter-insurgency strategy, the Overseas Internal Defense Policy (OIDP), approved by the president on 24 August 1962. Chester A. Bowles, who served briefly as undersecretary of state before Ball replaced him in December 1961, worried about the negative connotations of the term ‘internal security’. A former advertising agency executive, Bowles described the phrase as ‘pure dynamite – [that] should not be used in public’.89 Instead, policy-makers couched their public discussion of foreign internal security assistance in the language of liberal humanitarianism directed at Third World poverty, lack of opportunity, and social injustice.90 In classified government documents, however, Kennedy’s advisors outlined a much harsher program of action. With Castro in power, and insurgencies underway in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, time appeared to be running out. The United States, according to Rusk, had to take action before ‘the enemy’s subversive politico-military teams find fertile spawning grounds for their fish eggs’.91 In programmatic terms, what was needed was a range of political, economic and military measures designed to protect vulnerable developing countries. The OIDP called for an activist role for the Department of State, the new Agency for International Development (AID), the US Information Agency (USIA), the CIA and the Pentagon. A coordinated program of economic aid, military assistance,

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internal security training, and covert intelligence operations was intended to control or defeat insurgency in all its stages. In the case of regimes ‘not yet seriously threatened by communist subversion’, American aid would have a prophylactic function by contributing to the ‘[i]mmunization’ of friendly nations against the forces of instability. For those governments facing serious guerrilla challenges, US assistance would be directed against the defeat of insurgent forces. Above all, the OIDP insisted that defeating subversive insurgency was to be a largely local responsibility.92 The United States would supply military and civilian assistance as required to combat insurgency. However, direct US military intervention was to be avoided if at all possible. America’s conventional forces, heavily deployed in Europe and East Asia, were already stretched thin.93 Kennedy’s counter-insurgency strategy sought to relieve this pressure by offloading the burden of security on to the shoulders of Third World friends and allies. Kennedy policy-makers placed particular importance on foreign aid as a counter-insurgency tool.94 Counter-insurgency and foreign development were deemed part of the same process.95 The administration’s foreign-aid reform measures moved quickly through the legislative process. In September 1961, Congress passed legislation that split the Mutual Security Program into separate military and economic components. The legislation also established AID, a quasiautonomous body within the State Department. AID would function as the primary executor for all of the nation’s foreign aid grants, loans, technical assistance (including police assistance), and food aid. The agency, as the successor to the International Cooperation Administration, would focus on the developing nations of the world, with a particular emphasis on regime-strengthening measures such as improved education, public administration, and tax collection.96 Through a series of nation-building initiatives such as the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps, the administration hoped to nurture and protect social, political and economic institutions during this period of vulnerability to communist exploitation.97 On the military side, the administration dramatically increased the size of the army’s Special Forces and re-oriented the organization. The central focus of the Special Forces had been on organizing armed resistance movements to harass Soviet troops behind enemy lines, an outgrowth of the missions carried out by unconventional allied units during World War II.98 Under Kennedy, the Special Forces would stress training indigenous government forces to combat communist guerrillas. Enhancing the prestige and capabilities of the Special Forces became a pet project for the president. The army had long neglected its unconventional warriors, seeing them as antithetical to the organization’s central mission of preparing for and conducting ground operations with conventional combat divisions.99 Over the objections of General George H. Decker, the army chief of staff, Kennedy directed that the force be allowed to wear distinctive headgear,100 and the president personally supervised the selection of steel-lined sneakers for use in jungle patrols.101 Civilian agencies of government were also instructed to get on the counterinsurgency bandwagon. A new inter-departmental seminar for State Department,

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military and CIA personnel was created to instil in officials the importance of the counter-insurgency mission.102 Officials close to the president promoted the new doctrine with enthusiasm. ‘Everyone has views on it, and hardened jungle fighters like Professor Rostow and Professor Schlesinger talk with conviction about it’, noted one British diplomat in June 1962.103 However, much of the permanent government bureaucracy dismissed counter-insurgency as simply another New Frontier fad.104 The military, in particular, seemed to share little of the administration’s enthusiasm for internal defense.105 To ensure that the bureaucracy remained focused on the new counter-insurgency mission, Kennedy, at Taylor’s urging, established a new, high-level White House body, the Special Group (Counter-Insurgency). Although Kennedy generally favored a freewheeling, ad hoc approach to decision-making, Taylor convinced the president that such arrangements were dangerous and had led to ill-conceived operations like the Bay of Pigs.106 Chaired by Taylor, the new committee included Rusk, McNamara, AID Administrator Fowler Hamilton, Director of Central Intelligence John McCone, and Attorney General Kennedy. The Special Group (C-I) directed the development of doctrine, reviewed training of US government personnel, examined weapons and technology research and development, and drew up detailed internal defense plans for countries such as Vietnam, Iran, and Guatemala.107 The attorney general acted as the president’s eyes and ears on the committee, and he relished his role as counter-insurgency’s chief booster.108 However, Robert Kennedy’s relentless enthusiasm and brusque, prosecutorial manner proved to be counterproductive. In the words of Robert Amory, a senior CIA official, counter-insurgency was frequently seen as a ‘ridiculous battle cry … [there was an] extreme kind of reaction to Bobby Kennedy’s insistence that everybody get gung-ho about it’.109

Police and counter-insurgency As he and his advisors sought to create a new response to the threat of subversive insurgency, the president took a personal interest in the question of what contribution internal security forces could make. Komer, the NSC staff member who oversaw the administration’s overseas internal security assistance, later recalled that the president was ‘really enthusiastic about police programs, which … tied in with his emphasis on unconventional warfare’.110 Komer was the leading administration advocate for the idea that Eisenhower had not used foreign police and paramilitary assistance to its full potential. In characteristically blunt fashion, Komer (who would earn the nickname ‘Blowtorch Bob’), announced to his NSC colleagues in May 1961 that under Eisenhower, internal security assistance was an ‘orphan child’ that had been ‘shamefully neglected’ by the national security bureaucracy.111 For its part, the Rostow’s Policy Planning Council attributed the Eisenhower era’s internal security assistance shortcomings not to neglect, but to the administration’s failure to embrace the modernization nostrums advocated by social science theorists.112 Police were the ideal prophylactic against insurgency – the ‘preventive medicine’ intended to thwart guerrilla movements in their nascent stage, Komer

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declared in February 1961.113 Political, social and economic modernization was both inevitable and desirable. In keeping with the American tradition of Lockean revolution, US officials deemed dramatic change to be permissible, but only if carried out in well-behaved and controllable fashion, with the political rabblerousers kept firmly in check. ‘Properly voiced dissent’ Komer deemed acceptable. However, friendly regimes needed to silence subversive voices that threatened the orderly modernization process.114 Indeed, government repression, appeared to be an inevitable by-product of modernization. ‘[O]utside of the English-speaking and Scandinavian worlds, no society has yet broken through the development barrier without reliance on authoritarian techniques’, the Policy Planning Council concluded.115 Komer conceptualized the police as all-purpose internal-security problem solvers. In their daily contact with the people, the police were closest to the ‘nests of discontent’ among the population and thus could serve as an early warning system that could alert a regime to potential subversion.116 Police could also ‘ferret out subversive elements’ before they became a serious threat,117 and could be used to control riots and demonstrations with a minimum use of force, the latter of particular concern to Kennedy.118 As recognized during the Eisenhower administration, however, the police could only do so much during periods of more organized and protracted violence. In countries where guerrilla operations were widespread, police could not be expected to engage main-force units. If properly trained, however, police forces could play an important supporting role by supplying military commanders with intelligence and cutting off the supply of resources to insurgent units.119 Helping friendly regimes in less-developed regions strengthen their internal security forces would also contribute to a critical goal articulated by modernization theorists: increasing state authority and presence. According to the administration’s policy, weak governmental institutions invited political violence, instability and communist subversion.120 The police and paramilitary forces would serve a dual role. As guardians of the state, they would help prevent or contain subversive violence by identifying and controlling undesirable elements. As representatives of the state, they would serve as outward and visible manifestations of the regime’s presence and concern for its subjects. Counter-insurgency-oriented internal security assistance would reflect this dual purpose. In the administration’s judgement, achieving these goals required the United States to organize, train and equip Third World police forces along American lines. If the United States represented the apogee of the modernization and development process, it stood to reason that it was both possible and desirable for America to replicate its institutions, philosophies and techniques across the Third World. Indigenous ground combat units, under American tutelage and support, were transformed into junior versions of the firepower-intensive maneuver forces the United States had deployed around the world. The United States also attempted to export other American institutions to the Third World, and strove to fashion legislatures, political parties, and government bureaucracies in the American image.121

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Similarly, US officials sought to transplant American-style law enforcement institutions in the developing world. There were two exceptions, however. First, the United States itself had no paramilitary forces, such as gendarmeries or constabularies. However, it did have a civilian militia in the form of the National Guard. While technically a military institution under the control of US state governors (and, when federalized, under the authority of the president), the parallels to paramilitary forces were close enough for the guard to function as a model for the development of Third World constabularies. Second, and more significantly, the United States had a radically decentralized law enforcement structure, with some 18,000 separate local and state police forces. American policy-makers concluded that as attractive as this decentralized police establishment was, it was impracticable for the Third World. American clients, officials believed, needed to strengthen their state authority and presence, and could hardly afford to scatter resources and power among a plethora of independent forces. As a result, US internal security assistance policy stressed the centralization of law enforcement power and the creation of national police forces.122 In the meantime, Komer and other White House officials began spurring the US national security bureaucracy into action on police assistance and other key components of the new internal defense program. The arguments made by Komer and others about the need to strengthen the US internal security assistance program had a favorable reception at the highest levels of government. On 22 November 1961, Kennedy issued NSAM 114, which ordered national security agencies to review US assistance to foreign internal security forces to ensure that American aid was contributing to the administration’s counter-insurgency objectives.123 NSAM 114 indicated that the White House placed first priority on internal security assistance, and it ushered in an intense period of high-level efforts to reinvigorate the US government’s foreign internal security assistance program.

Energizing the bureaucracy During the early 1960s, as during the Eisenhower years, three agencies – the CIA, the Department of Defense (DOD) and Agency for International Development – conducted most of the US government’s overseas internal security assistance. The CIA trained foreign police and paramilitary forces in counter-subversion, counter-guerrilla, and intelligence-gathering techniques.124 NSAM 162, inter alia, ordered the CIA to expand its counter-subversive training and support of indigenous intelligence organizations.125 The CIA, according to the 1962 White House report, spent roughly $2 million a year supplying counter-subversive training to foreign internal security forces,126 and approximately 1,450 foreign personnel received such training annually.127 The Shah of Iran’s notorious secret police force, SAVAK, was one such recipient of CIA training.128 The Defense Department was also deeply involved in internal security assistance programs, some of which it had been conducting since the 1940s. Strictly

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speaking, DOD did not assist civil police organizations. In a number of countries, however, the US armed forces supported paramilitary units, like the Civil Guard in South Vietnam, that were organized and equipped along military lines but whose duties included internal security as well as external defense missions. In fiscal year 1962, $17.8 million in military assistance funds was spent on internal security training in six countries: South Vietnam, Iran, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama and the Philippines. South Vietnam, with $12 million in paramilitary assistance a year, was by far the largest recipient of Pentagon support.129 AID provided the vast bulk of the overt US assistance. However, officials like Komer and Bundy were alarmed by the agency’s reluctance to embrace the policetraining mission, an activity the president considered vital to his overall counter-insurgency efforts. For example, the heads of AID missions in countries such as Thailand and Colombia – deemed highly vulnerable to communist subversion – were proposing cuts in police assistance programs. Such actions confirmed White House suspicions that AID regarded internal security assistance as a less than urgent priority.130 Komer noted that AID mission directors in overseas posts judged internal security assistance programs by the same narrow criteria they used to evaluate other foreign aid activities, and police training suffered in comparison. AID personnel, he told Bundy in February 1962, ‘naturally tended to slough off or down-grade police programs along with a host of other minor technical assistance type activities’.131 AID officials resisted getting involved in the ‘dirty business of internal defense’, concluded U. Alexis Johnson, the deputy unde-secretary of state for political affairs.132 ‘Quite obviously’, Komer recalled in a 1964 interview, AID was ‘not terribly interested in giving guns to cops or training them in riot control’.133

‘Fourth-class citizens’ Komer’s suspicions about AID’s attitude toward internal security assistance were correct. In public, the agency’s leaders reaffirmed the importance of police and paramilitary forces in nation-building and counter-insurgency.134 In private, however, many AID officials resisted the mission, as foreign aid officials had under Eisenhower. Kennedy was determined to force AID’s cooperation, and under personal pressure from the president, Hamilton vowed to reform the agency’s ways and move forward on bolstering the police training programs.135 However, Komer and others remained sceptical about AID’s commitment to internal defense. ‘My antennae tell me that police programs are still fourth-class citizens in AID’, Komer informed an NSC colleague in April 1962.136 The foreign assistance agency, had a ‘peanut [police] advisory program’ and ‘really has little interest in running this business’, he complained in June.137 Frustrated at the apparent lack of progress in enhancing the police assistance role in counter-insurgency, White House officials considered shifting public safety programs out of AID. But as lackadaisical as AID appeared to be, the alternatives were just as unappealing. While superficially suitable, the Pentagon was rejected, since in Komer’s words ‘[w]e don’t want a bunch of colonels running

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programs in which they have no particular expertise’.138 The CIA, for its part, was reluctant to undertake programs that were fundamentally overt in nature, fearing that police training would risk exposing agency personnel.139 To resolve the issue, Kennedy established a White House panel to examine roles, missions and functions questions surrounding police assistance.140 The Interagency Committee on Police Assistance Programs in Newly Emerging Countries, known as the Johnson Committee after its chairman U. Alexis Johnson, was the Kennedy administration’s most thorough review of police and paramilitary assistance and its role in counter-insurgency.141 Its report represents the administration’s most comprehensive statement on the role of US internal security assistance in combating subversion, instability and insurgency. The chief purpose of such assistance, in the committee’s judgement, was ‘to counter Communist emphasis on subversive aggression’.142 Toward that end, police assistance programs should aim at achieving three goals: (1) increasing the ability of civil police and other internal security organizations to maintain public order with a minimum of violence; (2) strengthening the counter-subversive capabilities of these forces; and (3), developing humane policing methods and upgrading the image and character of internal security forces.143 The report urged the US government to press Britain, France and other allies to expand their internal security assistance programs. Police assistance, like all other elements of foreign aid, had become a subject of competition between Washington and Moscow. It was hoped that coordination among US allies would ensure that Western police assistance was available to any developing country that needed it, thus reducing the likelihood that Third World governments would turn to Moscow or Beijing for assistance.144 Although the Johnson Committee criticized other agencies, particularly with respect to their continuing neglect of counter-subversive training, the report’s harshest words were reserved for AID. Training of foreign police and US public safety advisors needed to be improved dramatically.145 More important, there was no single organization within the foreign aid agency with responsibilities for police training.146 Nevertheless, the committee could find no appropriate alternative to housing the police program at AID.

Creation of the Office of Public Safety The Johnson Committee report confirmed Kennedy’s suspicions about the national security bureaucracy’s half-hearted approach to the internal security assistance mission. Once again, the president singled out AID for particular attention. In NSAM 177, issued on 7 August 1962, Kennedy told the agency to increase its police training program substantially.147 The president also ordered a re-organization of AID’s internal security assistance bureaucracy. The Office of Public Safety (OPS), established on 1 November 1962, created a new institutional home for international police assistance programs. As a quasi-independent organization within AID, OPS, according to its charter, would provide ‘centralized professional and technical planning and policy guidance

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to the Country Teams, police missions, and State and AID Regional Bureaus’.148 OPS was also meant to serve as a continual reminder to the AID and other government agencies that internal security training remained an important priority for the administration, and that the days of inertia and neglect were over.149 Byron Engle, a senior police assistance official in ICA and AID, was appointed director. Engle’s background made him an ideal figure to head AID’s new counter-insurgency-oriented police assistance program. Unlike many other foreign aid officials, Engle was committed to the administration’s goal of employing police assistance as part of counter-insurgency.150 Engle supported both the nation-building and repressive goals of the administration’s internal defense policy. The Kennedy administration, according to Thomas Lobe, saw Engle as ‘the perfect blend of deep commitment to civilian police work as an important and worthwhile occupation in society and an … appreciation for the darker areas of political police intelligence’.151 By the end of 1962, AID appeared to be fully committed to a revitalized and expanded public safety effort. Under Engle, OPS focused on bread-and-butter police assistance, such as modernizing communications, improving administration, and creating better command and control centres.152 AID assured the president that the days of under-funding police assistance were over, and that the agency was doubling the fiscal year 1963 budget to $33,744,000.153 A total of 171 US police advisory personnel were providing assistance in some 30 countries, a substantial increase over the Eisenhower years, and key countries like South Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand were receiving particular OPS attention.154 By August 1963, AID police assistance programs were training more than one million internal security personnel around the world.155 Despite some indications of a greater AID commitment to police public safety training, White House officials remained troubled by AID’s performance. The perenially unpopular foreign aid budget was under attack in Congress. In 1963, congressional appropriators slashed the AID budget from $4.9 billion to $3.2 billion, the lowest amount of foreign aid since 1958.156 White House officials worried that AID would use these cuts as an excuse to cut back on internal security assistance, an activity Komer and others suspected the agency was still resisting. While Komer and others were engrossed with questions of AID’s institutional will, more fundamental questions about police and paramilitary assistance went unaddressed. White House officials were ‘preoccupied with AID’s organizational structure … and with the even larger question whether the program should be transferred to another agency’, an AID official concluded in April 1962.157 In Maechling’s judgement, the White House staff’s immersion in organizational details reflected the president’s long-standing frustration over what he considered to be the unwieldy and unresponsive nature of the US national security bureaucracy as a whole.158 To be sure, Kennedy had a deep-seated antipathy toward the national security machinery he had inherited. At the same time, however, his administration’s focus on structure rather than underlying problems and assumptions was the product of a deeper set of beliefs within the American culture of the age.

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This focus on technique, organization and institutional behavior was a product of a period in which managerial competence in business and public life was deeply cherished by the nation’s elite. ‘[T]he industrial age’, John M. Jordan has observed, ‘tested government with new and intractable technical problems that required efficient management’.159 During the late 1920s and early 1930s, President Herbert Hoover stressed the importance of enlightened expertise in implementing and evaluating government policy.160 Under Kennedy, the American faith in technocratic expertise reached its pinnacle, and men whom Michael H. Hunt has described as ‘masters of scientific management and analysis’ would assume real power.161 Komer, the president’s leading goad to the bureaucracy on police assistance issues, was a graduate of Harvard Business School, the temple of managerial professionalism, and the president himself strove to convey an image of cool, detached competence. McNamara, another Harvard Business School graduate, was the embodiment of the supremely rational managerialist. Gary Wills has vividly described McNamara as the embodiment of ‘nonpartisan hard-headedness – the wire hair bent around his iron ball of a head, his body kept lean in murderous squash games, his blazing eyeglasses wired to receive computer data’.162 On a deeper level, Americans were supremely confident in the power of reason and scientific progress and were committed to the notion that they could – and should – socially engineer foreign societies as well as their own.163 As McNamara acknowledged in his memoirs, ‘I had always been confidant that every problem could be solved’.164 Technical, apolitical approaches seemed the best way to achieve desired outcomes.165 Dramatic foreign aid post-war successes, such as the Marshall Plan, generated great optimism among policy-makers, academics, businessmen, and other elites, and contributed to the belief that similarly dramatic progress in the benighted areas of the world would be relatively easy to achieve.166 Modernization theory and its offspring, counter-insurgency, reflected the view that the right analytical and programmatic tools, properly applied, would lead to the prompt and just resolution of the Third World’s most fundamental challenges. However, while decision-makers were focusing on administrative techniques and organization, more fundamental questions about counter-insurgency in general, and internal security assistance in particular, were going unasked. Had they been posed, some of these questions might have led to doubts about fundamental tenets, beliefs and assumptions underlying broader aspects of America’s approach to the problem of insurgency and subversion in the developing world.

The ‘lessons’ of the past For Komer and other Kennedy national security officials, recent history appeared to offer ample evidence that internal security forces such as the police, gendarmeries, and citizen militias could make a major contribution to the defeat of communists and other subversive elements. These cases, studied closely by administration officials, contributed to the belief that they had found the key to unlock the mysteries of insurgency and counter-insurgency.167 To Kennedy

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strategists, Western campaigns in Greece, in the Philippines, and Malaya suggested that by working closely with embattled local governments, and supplying a judicious mixture of military and economic assistance, communist subversion could be defeated.168 Police and paramilitary assistance, having made a signal contribution against the Greek, Filipino and Malayan rebels, should work against other subversive elements in the developing world. Other, potentially cautionary examples from recent history – such as the failure of French-organized village militias against the Viet Minh – were either not considered or dismissed as irrelevant. With the exception of the British, whom US officials regarded as political and cultural kinsman, counter-guerrilla campaigns waged by European colonial powers were considered tainted by a cynical imperial self-interest and thus not pertinent to the development of new American approaches.169 However, in deriving ‘lessons’ from the British experience in Malaya, decision-makers overlooked the fact that Britain, as the colonial power, exercised direct authority over Malayan police, military, and political institutions. The United States, on the other hand, was always eager to avoid the taint of colonialism, and thus preferred to wage its counter-insurgency campaigns indirectly, through local leaders like Ramon Magsaysay in the Philippines during the Huk rebellion and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam.170 Lacking the authority to control Third World governments directly, the United States, in Maechling’s words, frequently found itself ensnared in ‘indecisive entanglements and inconclusive results’.171

‘Cement police’ and ‘rice paddy cops’ During the Eisenhower era, public safety officials had grappled with the problem of recruiting personnel to serve in police advisory missions abroad. Young, enthusiastic and energetic cops were often unwilling to leave their careers and homes to work overseas. Retired policemen, while often available, frequently lacked the energy and knowledge of the latest policing techniques deemed crucial to effective advisory work. Kennedy administration decision-makers were particularly concerned that US advisors, many of whom were retired state or local police, lacked the requisite language skills.172 However, in their scramble to fill advisor slots, officials never asked the basic question of whether American transplants were actually suited to advise foreign policemen. In other words, were the professional experiences of US policemen from Trenton, Phoenix or Dayton applicable to conditions in Tegucigalpa, Luanda or Saigon? As one OPS advisor explained in a 1973 interview, [c]ement police weren’t able to advise rice paddy cops. For instance, a whole bunch of OPS advisors originated out of Walnut Creek, California, one of San Francisco’s bedroom cities. When they were suppressing crime in Walnut Creek, that meant shoplifting, traffic violations, family squabbles, petty stealing, throwing beer bottles out of speeding cars, and some Friday night mooning. Are their experiences going to help poor countries?173

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The Kennedy administration’s counter-insurgency strategists also failed to ask a related but deeper question: to what extent were American law enforcement concepts and institutions actually transferable to the developing world? During the Cold War, advocates of police assistance, reflecting the universalistic mindset of modernization theory, argued that the fundamental problems associated with ensuring public order were essentially the same everywhere in the Third World.174 If the problems were fundamentally identical, it stood to reason that the solutions were basically the same. The American ‘answer’ to the developing world’s public safety problems was the application of what Otwin Marenin has termed the ‘professional police model’ developed in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. This model stressed principles such as operational efficiency, unity of command, merit-based promotion, and the utilization of modern technology.175 Central to the police model was the underlying belief that policing was fundamentally an apolitical, technical, and problem-solving activity, as emphasized in O.W. Wilson’s Police Administration,176 the ur-text of the American law enforcement administration during the second half of the twentieth century.177

‘Apolitical policing Both the Kennedy administration and its predecessor embraced the apolitical policing model and attempted to export it to countries like South Vietnam. However, policing is in fact an inherently political activity, since the police ‘enforce decisions taken (or allowed) by political authorities, acting in support of specific regime concerns, such as survival’, as Alice Hills has observed.178 American police advisors, seeing themselves as humble technicians, typically sought to avoid political involvement in the countries where they served.179 Lacking language skills, political experience, and training in the cultural realities of nations where they advised, OPS personnel would have in all likelihood found it difficult to succeed in the political realm even if they had wanted to. However, by turning a blind eye to politics – societal ‘epiphenomena’, in the eyes of the modernization theorists – police advisors in the developing world were hamstrung. As MSU advisors discovered in Vietnam, corrupt and unstable regimes are likely to resist schemes to professionalize internal security forces. In such environments, fundamental public-order problems could not be solved by the application of value-neutral scientific management principles or technology.180 Busy Kennedy administration policy-makers, eager to energize the AID bureaucracy and get internal security assistance ‘back on track’, overlooked other issues of substance. Government documents and public statements by officials stressed the need to prepare countries to cope with a spectrum of instability ranging from subversion to full-blown insurgency. Although spending on national security programs increased under Kennedy, resources were by definition limited, and it was impossible to do all things at once.181 Yet administration officials never developed a framework for deciding which activity – nation-building or counter-insurgency – should receive priority in any given country. Focusing on the former, and strengthening municipal police forces, would short-change

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paramilitary forces. Devoting more resources to repressive forces intended to crush rebellions would leave less for the ‘cop on the beat’. Although nation-building and counter-insurgency were viewed as two sides of the same coin, their goals sometimes conflicted, a fact never addressed adequately by administration decision-makers. Lacking a policy framework, OPS personnel were buffeted between bureaucratic forces arguing for more or less emphasis on repression or nation-building.182 Finally, national security officials did not consider what might be regarded as the most fundamental issue underlying the US program to develop foreign internal security forces: the ability of the United States to refashion the police and paramilitary of friendly regimes in America’s image. Of course, this question applies equally to the much broader issue of America’s lack of realism about its entire counter-insurgency effort.183 In the narrower case of internal security assistance, it is startling that Kennedy policy-makers never considered the enormity of the challenge they faced in just one part of the overall counter-insurgency program. Promoting institutional changes within the internal security forces that involve their relationships with the state and society as a whole are the most difficult for outside actors to achieve. As David H. Bayley has concluded, reforms intended to change the purpose, functions, control and accountability of the police are least likely to be exported successfully to other countries. No government will easily relinquish control of these, whatever its character. Examples include centralization, civilian oversight, separation from the military, political surveillance, [and] intelligence gathering.184 Yet in many countries this is precisely what the Kennedy administration was attempting to do. Adding to the challenge was the fact that the United States was in some cases, such as Vietnam, trying to affect such changes in the midst of an ongoing insurgency. In fairness to Kennedy, it should be noted that his predecessor also chose not to examine too closely the fundamental assumptions underlying US foreign internal security assistance programs. Under Eisenhower, public safety officials also sought to export the US professional police model to countries as diverse as South Vietnam, Indonesia and Brazil. Yet even when the US approach failed to achieve its intended results, as in South Vietnam during the late 1950s, decision-makers never re-appraised the tenets underlying US overseas internal security program. Perhaps it is unfair to expect senior officials, confronted daily by crises, to engage in systematic explorations of the fundamental assumptions lying beneath their policies. This is particularly true during intervals of acute tension, such as the half decade between 1958 and 1963, which James G. Hershberg has characterized appropriately as ‘the period of the most acute and dangerous tensions between “East” and “West”’.185 Under such difficult circumstances, it is hardly surprising that policy-makers did not engage in deep introspection about their approach to containing communist subversion abroad. When confronted with policy failures, as in the case of South Vietnam, it was far easier for national security officials to avoid questions relating to core concepts and focus instead on shortfalls in implementation and administration.186

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Conclusion John Maynard Keynes famously observed in 1936 that ‘[p]ractical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’. John Kennedy, even more than most practical men, embraced some of the ideas put forward by what Keynes termed the ‘academic scribbler’.187 As Lawrence Freedman has correctly concluded, the 1961–63 period in Washington was a time marked by ‘the enthusiasm of the intellectuals for a chance to demonstrate their value to the world of policy, and in the willingness of their audience to believe them’.188 For Kennedy, modernization theory, as distilled by his administration’s foreign policy intellectuals, offered a systematic way to address a major concern of his administration, the apparent spread of communist subversion and insurgency in the developing world. The administration’s counter-insurgency strategy, an operationalized form of modernization theory, sought to defeat the communist challenge through the coordinated use of American diplomatic, military, and economic assistance to embattled ‘free world’ regimes. Police and paramilitary assistance was particularly important in the view of Kennedy and advisors like Rostow, Komer, and Hilsman. As the president told Congress in March 1961, nations in the southern hemisphere faced the threat of ‘intense subversive activity designed to break down and supersede the new – and often frail – modern institutions they have thus far built’.189 Strong internal security forces were intended to protect the fragile modern institutions deemed to be at risk in the Third World. Police and paramilitary forces, in the administration’s view, should serve as the ‘first line of defense’ against the communist threat.190 Public safety forces, properly organized, trained, and equipped in accordance with the American model, would ensure order, protect property, and allow for a tumultuous but peaceful transition to democracy. In Kennedy’s judgement, the Eisenhower administration had largely ignored foreign internal security assistance, just as it had failed to capitalize on the potential for foreign aid to ameliorate the conditions the communists were apparently exploiting. As Rostow’s Policy Planning Council charged in March 1961, ‘there is a long and undistinguished history of [the] US effort to grapple with the specific problem of internal security’.191 Under Kennedy’s direction, his lieutenants scrambled to re-organize the administrative structure for supplying American aid to foreign police and paramilitary forces. For Kennedy and his White House advisors, internal security was a challenge to be approached de novo. But under the New Frontier, as during the Eisenhower era, decision-makers failed to grapple with a set of questions more fundamental than what organizational arrangements were most appropriate. In particular, the Kennedy administration did not ask whether it was in fact possible to export to the ‘less developed world’ the American paradigm for law enforcement and public safety. As supreme rationalists, the Kennedy national security strategists were supremely confident in their ability to devise universally applicable solutions to the most intractable problems of war, revolution, and peace.192

6

‘Ridiculous representatives of Mr Diem’ Paramilitary forces and the Strategic Hamlet Program, 1961–3

Introduction By 1960, the Vietnamese communists had changed their strategy, and a full-scale insurgency against the Diem government was underway. In Eisenhower’s view, urgent action was required to shore up America’s beleaguered ally. ‘We had rescued this country from a fate worse than death’, Eisenhower declared at a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) in May, ‘and it would be bad to lose it at this stage’.1 Kennedy shared his predecessor’s alarm over developments in South Vietnam, and during 1961, Washington forged a new commitment to the survival of the Diem regime. Resisting the entreaties of some of his advisors, who urged the deployment of US combat forces, Kennedy sought a new strategic concept for defending South Vietnam. Since the late 1960s, Vietnam scholars have explored the role of strategic hamlets in combating Vietnam’s communist insurgency.2 Important recent work has examined how modernization theory shaped the administration’s thinking about the Strategic Hamlet Program.3 Historians have also shown how conflict between Washington and the Diem government over the strategic hamlets reflected competing notions about what was required to ensure the survival of a non-communist South Vietnam.4 New research has also shed light on the British Advisory Mission in South Vietnam (BRIAM) during the early 1960s, and has placed those activities in their broader Cold War context.5 Robert Thompson, the BRIAM chief, articulated a police-oriented rural security strategy that found a willing audience at the White House, and Thompson’s support for the strategic hamlets helped win over the Kennedy administration to the concept. However, Vietnam historians have not explicitly considered the role of the Civil Guard, the Self-Defence Corps (SDC), and the village militias, the paramilitary forces Kennedy administration officials deemed essential to the success of the strategic hamlets. This chapter will examine how the failure of US paramilitary assistance contributed to serious shortfalls in the hamlet program as a whole. The Diem regime contributed to these shortcomings, but much of the blame can be attributed to American institutional factors. As during the Eisenhower administration, a gap emerged between Washington’s expectations for the paramilitary units and what US military advisors actually did on the ground. Senior military

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officers were nominally committed to Kennedy’s new strategy. In reality, American military advisors remained wedded to the conventional US army concept – what Douglas Blaufarb has termed the ‘find ’em, fix ’em, and fight ’em’ approach – and this was reflected in their half-hearted assistance to the paramilitary forces.6 Kennedy’s strategy for strengthening South Vietnam’s rural security thus contained a significant weakness. The US organization given the responsibility for carrying out a key aspect of the Kennedy agenda for South Vietnam was institutionally ill-suited to conduct a mission the administration deemed essential.

Kennedy’s Vietnam commitments Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower a growing crisis in South East Asia, where American-backed regimes faced increasingly powerful threats from communist insurgencies. In Hanoi in early 1961, the Politburo concluded that its long-standing goal of reunifying South Vietnam and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) peacefully would be impossible to achieve, and that it would be necessary to intensify the politico-military struggle in the South against the Diem regime. China, which had previously withheld its support for a full-blown armed conflict, fearing possible US military intervention, had entered a new phase of foreignpolicy militancy. For Mao Zedong, confrontation with the United States seemed both inevitable and desirable, and in the summer of 1962, Beijing agreed to provide the DRV with enough weapons and ammunition to equip 230 infantry battalions below the seventeenth parallel.7 In the south, the communist-dominated National Liberation Front (NLF), formed on 10 December 1960,8 and the movement’s military wing, the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) – the so-called ‘Viet Cong’ – were making impressive gains, and the Diem regime faced a powerful challenge to its existence. The NLF controlled much of the countryside and was beginning to threaten Saigon itself. Communist guerrilla forces, after five years of government repression, had become more aggressive, carrying out assassinations, sabotage, and increasingly large military operations, seemingly at will.9 By one credible estimate, the communists killed roughly eleven village officials a day during 1960 and 1961.10 After more than half a decade of US support, Diem’s prospects appeared as gloomy as they had in 1954, when the Eisenhower administration began creating an anti-communist bastion below the seventeenth parallel. Although Kennedy was familiar with South East Asia – he had travelled to Saigon in 1951, and had been a member of the pro-Diem American Friends of Vietnam since the mid-1950s – South Vietnam’s rapidly deteriorating condition came as a shock. During the first days of his presidency, he asked Walt W. Rostow, then the deputy national security advisor, ‘[t]his is the worst one we’ve got, isn’t it? You know, Eisenhower never mentioned it. We talked at length about Laos, but never uttered the word Vietnam’.11 Despite the Diem regime’s apparent inability to defend itself, there is no evidence that Kennedy seriously considered abandoning the American commitment to South Vietnam, although by the spring of 1963 the president had come to accept the argument of some of his advisors that new

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leadership was necessary in Saigon if the country was to defeat the communist insurgency. Kennedy never questioned the fundamental assumptions about South Vietnam and its supposed linkage to other issues of US national security that he had inherited from Eisenhower. Central was the belief that the failure of the United States to secure South Vietnam would embolden the communist leaders in Moscow and Beijing who directed the international communist movement. Kennedy feared that a failure to maintain a commitment to South Vietnam would lead to the erosion of American credibility in South East Asia and other critical regions of the world.12 As the president explained in an interview at the end of his life, a communist victory in South Vietnam would ‘give the impression that the wave of the future in southeast Asia was China and the Communists’.13 An American pullout from Vietnam, Kennedy observed on another occasion, might lead the world to the conclusion that ‘Superman is a fairy’.14 The president also feared the domestic political repercussions he was certain would follow a communist triumph in Vietnam. The Chinese communist victory over the US-backed Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, and the subsequent Republican cry, ‘Who lost China?’, had haunted the Democratic party for more than a decade. Throughout his presidency, Kennedy saw himself as vulnerable to charges from the political right that he was ‘soft’ on communism. The president believed that a series of recent international events – the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961, the continuing tensions over Berlin, the disastrous June 1961 summit meeting in Vienna with Nikita Khrushchev, and the neutralization of Laos during the summer of 1962 – served as ammunition for the growing conservative movement in America.15 Senator Barry Goldwater, promoting free markets, limited government, and anti-communism, was emerging as a national political figure, and the growth of extremist organizations, such as the John Birch Society (which alleged that Eisenhower was a communist agent), and the Minutemen (a violent, anti-government paramilitary group) were creating alarm among mainstream politicians and intellectuals.16 Kennedy calculated that a failure to support America’s anti-communist ally in Saigon would be political suicide for his presidency and the Democratic party. As Kennedy told an advisor in 1963, ‘[i]f I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands’.17 Finally, South Vietnam seemed to be a place were the administration’s new strategy for containing and defeating communist-sponsored insurgency could be tested.18 Never far from Kennedy’s mind was Khrushchev’s truculent ‘wars of national liberation speech’, in which the Soviet premier pledged to back anticolonial uprisings. An American success in South Vietnam, in Kennedy’s view, might serve as an object lesson to rebels in other restless regions of the world and their supposed patrons in Moscow and Beijing.19 In the president’s view, victory would hinge on more than the application of firepower. If the guerrillas were to be defeated, the United States would need to apply a counter-insurgency strategy, a carefully calibrated measure of political, economic, psychological and covert actions.20

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During the spring and summer of 1961, Kennedy was preoccupied with issues other than Vietnam, such as the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the summit meeting with Khrushchev. In the autumn, he turned his attention to South East Asia. By the end of that year, his decisions had resulted in a new and deeper American commitment to the Diem regime and the defeat of the Viet Cong insurgency. Kennedy’s policy steered a characteristic middle course. A plan to ‘neutralize’ Vietnam, put forward by W. Averell Harriman, the US ambassador at large and principle architect of the scheme to neutralize Laos, was rejected by Kennedy, who believed that such a course of action would fail to demonstrate US resolve, bolster American credibility, or contain communist aggression.21 In Rostow’s phrase, it was necessary for Kennedy to act decisively and remove the ‘sickly pallor of our positions on Cuba and Laos’.22 At the same time, the president resisted appeals from his more hawkish advisors to commit US combat forces to South Vietnam’s defense.23

The Taylor–Rostow mission The debate within the administration over the deployment of US troops to South Vietnam came in the wake of a report prepared by Taylor and Rostow after their mission to South Vietnam during late October and early November 1961. The report’s authors recommended the deployment of a US military task force, ostensibly to carry out flood relief operations, but in reality to demonstrate the ‘seriousness of the US intent to resist a Communist take-over’ and to serve as an advance party in the event that US or South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) contingency plans were invoked.24 It also called for re-organizing and increasing the size of the US Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), headquartered in Saigon. In the judgement of the report’s authors it was necessary for the MAAG to evolve from a purely advisory body into ‘something nearer – but not quite – an operational headquarters in a theatre of war’.25 The mission also evaluated the Civil Guard and the SDC. Taylor and Rostow concluded that these units needed to be strengthened, but only so that Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) troops could be relieved of static defense missions. The broader question of public safety, counter-subversion and other internal security missions – deemed central by the administration’s counter-insurgency theorists – went unaddressed in the voluminous report. Most significantly, Taylor and Rostow urged a fundamental transformation of the relationship between Saigon and Washington. The United States, said Taylor and Rostow, should move beyond a purely advisory role and assume a ‘limited partnership’ with the Diem government. To be sure, the war had to be won by the Vietnamese themselves. But according to Taylor and Rostow, ‘the Vietnamese performance in every domain can be substantially improved if Americans are prepared to work side by side with the Vietnamese on key problems’. Toward that end, American military and civilian advisors should be inserted into Vietnam’s institutions at all levels to provide the most advanced and appropriate technical advice.26

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Kennedy turned down the task force proposal, but approved a number of the report’s other recommendations.27 Again, Kennedy chose a middle course that rejected a full-blown military response but provided for increases in securityoriented assistance and more US advisors. In so doing, the president expanded substantially the American presence in, and commitment to, South Vietnam. In National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 111, issued on 22 November 1961, Kennedy ordered increases in advisory personnel, whose numbers would grow from 800 to more than 16,000 by November 1963. NSAM 111 also approved the Taylor–Rostow recommendation for the Civil Guard and the SDC. The United States would train and equip the paramilitary forces so as to allow the ARVN to conduct offensive combat operations.28 Kennedy also approved an important new command arrangement. The MAAG would be upgraded to the Military Assistance Advisory Command (MACV). The position of MAAG chief had been a three-star billet; MACV, on the other hand, would be led by a four-star general and the bureaucratic equal of the US ambassador. At Taylor’s urging, Kennedy named to the post Lt. General Paul D. Harkins, a Taylor protégé with no counter-insurgency experience.29 Harkins embodied ‘the institutional Army, which had grown bureaucratic and self-satisfied after its victory in World War II and imagined success in Korea’, according to Deborah Shapley. 30

MACV, the Civil Guard, and the SDC Much of the Vietnam policy deliberations in Washington during late 1961 focused on whether or not to commit US troops to bolster Diem’s beleaguered regime. Kennedy’s decision not to deploy combat forces meant that South Vietnamese forces alone would have responsibility for conducting combat operations against guerrilla units. The administration saw the paramilitary forces as a relatively quick way to augment the ARVN’s conventional capabilities. NSAM 111 was part of a series of actions taken during 1961 to strengthen the guard and the SDC. Under the terms of the MAAG’s Counter-Insurgency Plan (CIP), approved by the president in January, the ARVN force structure would be increased from 150,000 to 170,000, and the 68,000-man Civil Guard would receive a major increase in US training and matériel assistance.31 Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, during a visit to Saigon in May, told Diem that the United States would assume complete financial responsibility for the Civil Guard, a burden that had been shared by the two governments in the past.32 US military advisors would train and equip the guard using American military assistance funds. Before 1960, US military advisors had largely dismissed the threat posed by guerrillas, preferring instead to focus their training for the ARVN on developing a force that could defeat, or at least slow down, a conventional invasion by North Vietnam.33 During the late 1950s, the MAAG insisted that the Vietnamese army did not need counter-guerrilla training, and that even if it did, the MAAG lacked the resources to give it.34 However, as the insurgency grew in intensity, US military advisors could no longer brush aside demands for specialized

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counter-guerrilla training. During 1961, senior officers claimed that paramilitary units were receiving instruction in how to fight insurgents. Harkins’ predecessor, Lieutenant General Lionel C. McGarr, announced in January that his program of instruction (POI) for the paramilitaries would transform ‘the militarily untrained civilian or para-military member into a counter-guerrilla combatant’.35 The evidence, though, suggests otherwise. British reports on the Civil Guard training could find no indication of counter-guerrilla instruction.36 Nor could police advisors at the US Operations Mission (USOM) in Saigon. The POI planned for the Civil Guard, one advisor concluded in January, ‘is the regular, conventional infantry program. The discussion of it has been larded with an occasional phrase such as ‘counter-guerrilla’ only as lip service to the need that so many people believe is there’.37 The US military’s approach was thus at odds with the administration’s emerging counter-insurgency doctrine. Insurgency, in the view of civilian officials like Rostow, and the president himself, was a special kind of conflict that required a mixture of politico-military action. Conventional combat was intended to play but a small role. Senior military officers essentially rejected this strategy. Although they supported the administration’s counter-insurgency tenets in public, they remained wedded to the belief that guerrillas could best be defeated the way the US army had vanquished other adversaries – through aggressive conventional operations and the liberal application of firepower.38 Only well-trained, well-equipped conventional troops were suitable against large rebel movements, a US army officer concluded in 1962: ‘suppressing even a few thousand skilled and determined revolutionaries is a major military undertaking – one far beyond the abilities of police or civil-guard’.39 Police-oriented approaches were firmly rejected. General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), informed Taylor in October 1961 that Civil Guard units that had received police training had been badly mauled in their encounters with Viet Cong guerrillas.40 Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who was rapidly becoming the Kennedy administration’s primus inter pares with respect to Vietnam policy, supported the US military’s plans to thoroughly conventionalize the Civil Guard.41 McNamara embraced a ‘search and destroy’ concept of operations that called for the Civil Guard and the ARVN to drive the Viet Cong out of their strongholds and annihilate them.42 The Civil Guard’s mission thus would be quite close to the one the MAAG had envisaged for it during the 1950s. The guard would be responsible for preventing the re-infiltration of communist guerrillas into areas that had been subject to conventional military sweeps. The SDC, for its part, was expected to provide some measure of security at the village and hamlet level, protecting government officials, guarding bridges and other installations, and manning defense posts.43 The absorption of the paramilitary forces by the ARVN was intended to give the Diem regime more conventional combat power against the PLAF. One of the consequences of the move was to deprive South Vietnam of a rural public-safety force. During the Eisenhower administration, US civilian police advisors had

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attempted unsuccessfully to transform the Civil Guard into a law-enforcement agency for Vietnam’s countryside, where the vast majority of the population lived. Now, with the paramilitaries under the control of the armed forces, the country’s only police were to found in larger cities and towns. For American military advisors in Saigon, and for senior officials in Washington like McNamara, the absence of a uniformed rural police force was not of great concern. With an estimated 25,000 main-force guerrillas operating in the South, their primary interest was in creating an indigenous army capable of finding and destroying the insurgents.44 For the counter-insurgency strategists, however, the lack of security in the country’s rural areas was deeply troubling. In the absence of a protective government force, the communist guerrillas were carrying out assassinations and sabotage with impunity, and routinely drawing upon the peasantry for food, recruits and other resources. In the judgement of the counter-insurgency enthusiasts, winning the war would require a new approach that sought to protect the rural population and win it over to the Diem regime. Under this new strategy, the Vietnamese paramilitary forces were expected to play an important role.

The Strategic Hamlet Program During 1962, American officials embraced a new concept for enhancing Vietnam’s rural security. Over the next eighteen months, the United States supported a large-scale effort to deny the guerrillas access to the population, food, shelter, and other resources. Under the Strategic Hamlet Program, the Diem government, with American backing, would attempt to fortify the country’s 15,000 hamlets with barbed wire, watchtowers, moats, and sharpened stakes.45 Without such access, it was believed, the guerrillas would be unable to sustain their operations and recruit new militants, and the insurgency would wither.46 The concept of fortifying hamlets as a counter-insurgency tool for Vietnam did not begin in Washington, however. New research identifies Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, as the originators of the concept. The program was borne of the Diem regime’s search for ‘a homegrown solution to the insurgency, one that would fulfil their nationalist and ideological aspirations, as well as stamp out communist subversion’, as Philip E. Catton has argued convincingly.47 Throughout his tenure in office, Diem solicited Washington’s material and political support. But as a determined nationalist with his own ideas about what was required to ensure his country’s security, as well as his own continued rule, he resisted American meddling in Vietnamese affairs. The hamlet program began in the aftermath of a particularly pronounced instance of American interference, the latest in a long series of US attempts to reorganize South Vietnamese institutions along American lines. During 1961, the United States tried to get Diem to adopt provisions of the CIP and the related Geographically Phased National Level Operation Plan. Specifically, McGarr pressured Diem to tidy up organizational and military command-and-control arrangements that had long irritated American military advisors. ARVN operations

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were to be carried out in areas under the political control of South Vietnam’s province chiefs, who also controlled paramilitary forces in their jurisdictions. This bilinear arrangement violated the unity of command principle deeply cherished by the American military. Vietnam required a ‘military command structure providing an exclusively military chain of command (i.e. no civil agency included) from the Chief of the Joint General Staff … to the operational units in the field’, McGarr told Nguyen Dinh Thuan, the Vietnamese secretary of state for the presidency, in March.48 Diem quickly dismissed the proposal. As irrational and inefficient as it seemed to the US military advisors, the bilinear command arrangement was part of the South Vietnamese leader’s strategy for survival. Having the paramilitary forces under the separate command of loyal province chiefs had created a counterweight to the powerful and politically unreliable ARVN, which had after all attempted a coup against him during the previous November.49 As Diem hinted to Taylor during his October 1961 visit to South Vietnam, the president had his own new strategic plan for winning the war.50 Fortified hamlets were not a new concept in Vietnam. During their war against the Viet Minh, the French had made resettlement of the rural population a key component of their strategy.51 In areas under Viet Minh control, according to two former ARVN generals, the guerrillas ‘turned every village into a resistance nest and used the popular saying ‘when bandits break into a house, even a woman fights back’’ as a popular rallying cry.52 More recently, Diem had sought to deny the communists access to the population through the creation of ‘agrovilles’. Widely considered a failure, the program uprooted peasants from their ancestral lands and relocated them far from their fields and burial plots.53 The Strategic Hamlet Program sought to avoid the popular resistance associated with the agrovilles by securing existing hamlets rather than attempting to create new ones in remote and unfamiliar areas. The new program stressed the physical control of the population, and thus had an obvious repressive component.54 At the same time, Diem imagined the strategic hamlets as serving broader ideological and even spiritual purposes. Diem conceived of the hamlet program as part of a larger campaign by the regime to build popular support for his government. Under Diem’s conception, the strategic hamlets were intended to be a ‘rice-roots’ effort by the rural population to provide for their own security. Vietnam’s long history of foreign domination had made self-sufficiency a key goal for Diem.55 By fortifying the hamlets themselves, making their own weapons, and manning checkpoints in and around the fortified areas, villagers were expected to overcome the traditional isolation of rural life and become integrated in the new society being created in South Vietnam.56 For Diem’s brother, whom the president placed in charge of the strategic hamlets, the program was intended to serve a more idiosyncratic purpose. The fortified hamlets, under Ngo’s conception, would function as a vehicle for propagating his quasi-mystical philosophy of ‘personalism’ (Nhan-vi) as an anti-materialist alternative to communism.57

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The British mission to Vietnam While the strategic hamlet concept originated with the Diem regime, outsiders would play an important role in its development. During the late 1950s, as the American advisory presence became overbearing, Diem looked for sources of advice that could serve as a counter-weight to the MAAG, the US embassy, and American officials in Washington.58 The Vietnamese president turned to Robert Thompson, a former deputy secretary and permanent secretary of defense of Malaya who had been deeply involved in Britain’s recent counter-insurgency campaign against the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). As a civil servant on the staff of Lieutenant-General Sir Harold Briggs, Thompson had devised a resettlement plan aimed at denying the MCP access to the ethnic Chinese ‘squatters’, the primary source of support for the insurgents. Strict population and food control measures, along with the provision of modern services aimed at what would become known as ‘winning hearts and minds’, were integral components of these so-called ‘New Villages’. Britain’s counter-insurgency strategy, known as the Briggs Plan, also stressed civil–military coordination, and the primacy of the police in gathering intelligence and conducting operations.59 The police, according to Thompson, were of paramount importance in any successful counter-insurgency campaign. Their presence throughout the country, and continuous close contact with the population, made them more important than the armed forces in defeating armed subversion.60 Thompson’s stress on the police role reflected a century of British colonial experience. Police agencies were at the forefront of the maintenance of imperial order.61 Colonial police typically had responsibility in urban areas for routine law enforcement, such as the protection of property and the suppression of vice. However, British internal security forces were less concerned with fighting crime than with thwarting political challenges to imperial authority. Toward this end, colonial administrators developed specialized forces for meeting threats identified as subversive, such as nationalist movements and trade unions, and for suppressing strikes, riots, and insurrections such as the Mau Mau rebellion.62 To deal with the more explicitly political aspects of challenges to British colonial rule, the authorities relied on the police Special Branch.63 In the British metropole, Special Branch had been operating since 1883, when it had been founded by Scotland Yard in response to the growth of Irish or ‘Fenian’ terrorism.64 In the colonies, local versions of Special Branch gathered intelligence on the political activities of opponents of British rule, often in cooperation with the Security Service (MI5), Britain’s counter-intelligence agency.65 As the Cold War unfolded during the late 1940s, Special Branch policeman and their political masters became increasingly concerned with communist subversive activities in the colonies, and in countries like the Gold Coast, the political police stepped up intelligence-gathering operations against local activists with suspected ties to Moscow.66 Britain’s relationship with local internal security forces frequently continued after independence was gained. Washington encouraged both Britain and

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France to provide police assistance to forces within their former colonial areas.67 During 1961 and 1962, for example, London supplied a total of $420,000 in technical advice and equipment to the national police in Somalia, the former British Somaliland.68

Thompson, Britain, and the United States The British campaign in Malaya impressed Diem, and in 1960 he asked the British government to send an expert to Saigon to describe in more detail how success was achieved against the MCP.69 Thompson arrived in South Vietnam in April, and after touring the countryside, he urged Diem to organize a counterinsurgency campaign along the lines Britain had used during the Emergency.70 By 1961, London and Saigon had agreed on the establishment of the BRIAM, which would operate from September 1961 until March 1965. Two factors contributed to Britain’s decision to send the Thompson team to South East Asia. First, Britain believed that US military advice to South Vietnam’s armed forces, with its emphasis on conventional operations, was doomed to fail. The Americans were ‘not very successful in advising and assisting Vietnam with their security problems’, the British ambassador in Saigon, Henry Hohler, concluded in June 1961, adding that US advisors were inclined ‘to devise too cumbrous a machine’ for defeating the communist insurgency.71 With long experience in conducting counter-guerrilla operations, Britain believed that its expertise could contribute to the security of South Vietnam and help ensure the survival of the Diem government.72 Thompson himself was held in high regard within the Foreign Office. ‘There is nothing that Thompson doesn’t know about counter-insurgency methods’, Lord Home, the British foreign secretary, told US Secretary of State Dean Rusk in August 1961.73 Britain had in fact been providing specialized assistance to Diem’s police and paramilitary forces since the late 1950s. This training, most of which was carried out in Malaya, included riot control courses for the Civil Guard, basic training and specialized instruction in interrogation techniques for the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation (VBI), as well as orientation visits to Britain for senior Civil Guard leaders.74 By 1961, the number of police and paramilitary forces receiving British training was substantial – 1,430 VBI and Civil Guard members per annum, at a cost of some £72,000.75 Britain’s decision to send Thompson to South Vietnam also reflected political considerations, particularly the desire of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s government to ensure the continued health of the ‘special relationship’ with Washington. BRIAM was a British initiative. In advising Diem, Britain hoped to demonstrate continuing influence in the region. More broadly, London hoped to demonstrate its relevance in the global struggle against communism.76 However, the BRIAM plan encountered American resistance at first, particularly in military circles. Some influential Americans in Saigon, like William Colby, the CIA station chief, valued Thompson’s expertise, but others, like McGarr, questioned Thompson’s qualifications.77 ‘I am unable … to pin down

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‘Thompson group’ qualifications and more important, its authority: only that they are anti-guerrilla ‘experts’’, McGarr informed Lemnitzer in June 1961.78 The MAAG chief was particularly concerned about potential BRIAM meddling in military matters, fearing that third-country involvement in the MAAG’s domain would muddy the MAAG’s relationship with the ARVN and undermine US prestige.79 Despite such objections, administration officials in Washington came to see the utility of a British mission to Saigon. Kennedy agreed with Britain’s rationales for initiating the BRIAM. On the political level, the United States was seeking to make the defense of South Vietnam more than just an American problem, and was working to secure the participation of key US allies like the United Kingdom.80 British participation through BRIAM would help demonstrate a unified free world position in the struggle to maintain an anti-communist government in South Vietnam.81 On an operational level, the White House agreed with the view that Britain could supply useful expertise to the embattled Diem regime. Kennedy strategists saw the British campaign in Malaya as the archetype of a successful counterinsurgency, and Thompson, as a key architect, was regarded as someone who had discovered the formula for defeating communist guerrillas. Thompson shared the Americans’ apolitical approach to policing and public order, their belief in the primacy of technique, and their commitment to administrative efficiency and rationalisation.82 Thompson, like his New Frontier colleagues, was a problemsolver committed to the notion that even a problem as vast and vexing as revolutionary warfare was amenable to a set of essentially technical solutions.83 Britain avoided potential conflict with US military advisors by focusing BRIAM’s terms of reference on police, intelligence, and other security-related matters that were outside the MAAG’s purview. Specifically, BRIAM would offer the Diem government advice on the training of indigenous civil servants working in rural areas, information and propaganda operations, the Strategic Hamlet Program, and police and counter-subversive activities.84 British support for civilian security forces would also include specialized training in the Malayan Federation that focused on improving interrogation and investigative techniques, population control measures, and immigration and border control.85

Thompson and strategic hamlets In October 1961, Thompson presented Diem with a ‘strategic appreciation’ of the situation in South Vietnam, in which he outlined an approach for defeating the communist insurgency. Thompson’s plan for Vietnam was essentially the strategy Britain had pursued in Malaya. To break the communist hold on the rural population, Thompson informed Diem, it would first be necessary to recognize that ‘this is a struggle to win the hearts and minds of the people and not just a battle to kill armed communist terrorists’.86 The current war of attrition against the communists was failing, and if Diem were to prevail, Saigon would have to launch a positive campaign to win the people ‘and to involve them in the war against the

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terrorists’. To be effective, according to Thompson, the government would also have to improve the social and economic well-being of the peasantry.87 But first the Diem government would have to take immediate action to provide real security for the rural population. Unlike Diem’s bottom-up approach to rural security, Thompson saw this as a responsibility of Vietnam’s central government. Like the American advisors in Vietnam, Thompson was a relentless centralizer and enthusiast for bureaucratic re-organization. His scheme to improve rural security included a consolidation of Vietnam’s Municipal Police, Civil Guard, and the VBI into a single national force.88 Thompson also observed that the regime lacked reliable intelligence, which he attributed to the fact that Vietnam had multiple and competing intelligence agencies. Indeed, security agencies had proliferated under Diem, no doubt to ensure that political power never became concentrated within any one service. By 1962, the Diem regime had ten intelligence agencies, each of which operated independently and, according to Thompson, at cross-purposes.89 Thompson urged the creation of a single intelligence organ, which would allow what he termed ‘concentration on the targets which really matter’.90 In November, Thompson gave Diem a pacification scheme that developed these ideas more fully. In what he called the ‘Delta Plan’, Thompson urged Diem to experiment with new security concepts in a relatively tranquil area south-west of Saigon. Villagers would erect physical defenses around their hamlets, and would organize militias for self-defense.91 Employing peasants to fight off the Viet Cong seemed obvious to Thompson, since in his words, ‘[a]ll peasants have a natural instinct for small scale guerrilla and anti-guerrilla operations’.92 Strict surveillance measures, such as curfews, checkpoints and identification cards, would help control the population and prevent the Viet Cong from gaining access to food and other essentials. Although peasants were expected to contribute to their own defense, under Thompson’s plan, the Diem government’s internal security forces would have much of the responsibility. The National Police organization proposed by Thompson would provide security as the hamlets were fortified, and would support local militias overwhelmed by guerrilla forces. The ARVN would have the task of clearing out any PLAF concentrations outside populated areas, keeping the guerrillas off balance, and providing whatever additional security might be necessary while the villagers erected their strategic hamlet defenses.93 But the Vietnamese military would have a largely secondary part to play in Thompson’s approach. Thompson’s belief in the need for the primacy of non-military internal security forces in counter-insurgency operations, and in the absolute necessity of operating under and maintaining the rule of law, was not new. It had been a central tenet of the campaign against the Malayan communists, and it had long been part of the British program of instruction in Malaya for Vietnam’s internal security forces.94 In the view of British security officials like Thompson, using one’s armed forces was self-defeating. If insurgency was in part a struggle for legitimacy, employing one’s armed forces to combat insurgents endowed opposition forces with an air of credibility. Employing the police, on the other

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hand, effectively criminalized insurgent forces and denied them standing as legitimate political actors.95 Diem rejected Thompson’s police consolidation plan, although he would embrace the more modest American centralization scheme that left out the Civil Guard.96 However, the president reacted favorably to the Delta Plan.97 Thompson’s approach contained many of the elements Diem’s own Strategic Hamlet Program already underway in the countryside. The MAAG, however, reacted angrily to Thompson’s ideas for rural security. Echoing Lemnitzer’s complaints to Taylor, McGarr argued that a strategy that relied so heavily on paramilitary forces could not succeed. Vietnam was not Malaya, said McGarr, and the insurgency had become too powerful to merit a primarily non-military response.98 Paramilitary forces, strategic hamlets, and winning hearts and minds were all well and good, but in the MAAG’s judgement, the war in Vietnam would be won by annihilating the adversary through the application of conventional military power.

A new ‘strategic concept’ In Washington, Thompson’s plan received a more favorable reception. During 1962, Kennedy was not particularly focused on South Vietnam, and would not be so until the spring of 1963, when the Diem regime’s violent repression of Buddhists and other dissidents caused a crisis in US–Vietnamese relations that ended in Diem’s overthrow. Events in other places – such as Berlin, where talks with the Soviets over the status of the divided city dragged on, and in Cuba, when Soviet offensive missiles were discovered in October – were more compelling demands on President Kennedy’s time.99 Trusted presidential advisors like McNamara routinely reassured Kennedy that progress was being made against the Viet Cong.100 At the same time, the president, who continuously searched for potentially useful new ideas, was willing to entertain a different approach to Vietnam. Taylor urged Kennedy to consider Thompson’s notions.101 Kennedy was impressed with Thompson, whose ideas were congruent with the White House’s emerging counter-insurgency doctrine.102 The president subsequently directed Roger Hilsman to use Thompson’s approach as the foundation for a new American strategic concept for Vietnam.103 Hilsman, the director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, had been sceptical of the US military’s firepower-intensive approach to defeating the Viet Cong insurgency. Like Thompson, Hilsman conceptualized the war as a hearts-and-minds struggle for the political allegiance of the country’s largely rural population. Rusk saw communist infiltration across the seventeenth parallel as the insurgency’s most important source of strength, and indeed, every month hundreds of communist cadre inched down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from the DRV through Laos and into South Vietnam.104 But Hilsman concluded correctly that the real source of the VC’s strength was indigenous to South Vietnam, and lay in the villages, where insurgency gained the vast bulk of its recruits, food and other resources.105

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Hilsman’s thinking shared Thompson’s key premises – that the war was fundamentally political, that any effective counter-insurgency program had to ensure the physical protection of the peasantry, and that non-military internal security forces should play a prominent role.106 But Hilsman went beyond Thompson’s approach by adding a conceptual layer that reflected modernization theory. For administration decision-makers like Hilsman, this framework served as an intellectual foundation for counter-insurgency concepts like the Strategic Hamlet Program.107Although they alone could not be expected to defeat an insurgency, Hilsman identified political development and institutional reform as critical if an embattled regime was to prevail.108 This view was shared on the ground by Americans like Frederick Nolting, the ambassador to Saigon from May 1961 to August 1963. As Nolting observed in his memoirs, institution-building was a key US objective. The United States, he noted, sought to create ‘an infrastructure of democratic institutions – schools, communications … economic development and health facilities – behind a strengthened screen of physical security for the people’.109 Hilsman’s strategic concept, delivered to President Kennedy in February 1962, operationalized the administration’s emerging counter-insurgency doctrine, and it would serve as the centrepiece of the Kennedy administration’s approach to defeating the Viet Cong insurgency.110 As Hilsman acknowledged, his plan relied heavily on the principles developed by Thompson: the struggle against the Viet Cong was primarily political rather than military; physical security for the rural population was essential for defeating the guerrillas; and conventional military tactics against the insurgents were of limited utility.111 Under Hilsman’s plan, paramilitary forces would bear the principal burden for providing security.112 At the village level, a SDC unit of 75–100 local men, equipped with simple firearms, would defend against Viet Cong attacks. The Civil Guard would secure the area between the villages by conducting night-time patrols, laying ambushes, and reinforcing villages under assault. Security at the hamlet level would be provided by small, unpaid militias made up of male residents who would receive a modicum of American-supplied ordnance. The VBI and Civil Guard would gather intelligence on the Viet Cong and enforce curfews, man roadblocks, check identify cards, and conduct other population and resourcecontrol measures. For its part, the ARVN would be re-oriented from conventional military operations that used firepower to destroy the guerrillas. Instead, the ARVN would keep the Viet Cong forces off balance through the use of tactics that stressed small-unit patrols, stealth and mobility.113 Once the hamlets had been constructed, nation-building programs designed to improve the social, political and economic life of the rural population would begin. Although not acknowledged by Hilsman, his strategic concept included many of Diem’s notions about employing the strategic hamlets as ideological tools. Hilsman advocated the creation of Vietnamese ‘civic action teams’ made up of medical, educational, agricultural and security personnel, which would work with the peasantry to improve public administration, train the SDC, and to foster political support for the Diem government.114

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Hilsman intended the SDC to do more than provide local security. With a membership drawn from local residents, the force would promote a sense of nationalism and identification with the Saigon regime, and would function as a transmission belt for the nation-building agenda envisaged by counter-insurgency strategists.115 Measures intended to speed up rural social, political and economic development, Hilsman noted, were the ‘single most important element in eliminating the Viet Cong’.116 South Vietnam’s governmental institutions, already weak and remote, had been eroded further by Viet Cong assassinations of village chiefs, schoolteachers, youth leaders, and other representatives of the state.117 Strategic hamlets were also expected to bolster the authority of the state and extend it into every nook and cranny of Vietnamese life, a key tenet of modernization theory.118

‘Like a rat caught in a trap’ Although the United States financed, advised and supported the strategic hamlets, the program was essentially Diem’s to carry out. Thus, it embodied the ‘limited partnership’ arrangement with Saigon that Kennedy and his lieutenants had promoted.119 In emphasizing the political nature of the conflict, the need to win the political loyalty of the rural masses, and the utility of political, social and economic nation-building measures, the Hilsman–Thompson strategy embodied key tenets of the administration’s counter-insurgency doctrine. Finally, the high-level support for the new initiative may have reflected a frustration with the existing strategy. Given the size and aggressiveness of the guerrilla forces, and Diem’s apparent inability to control the growing armed rebellion in the south, American policy-makers may simply have concluded that something else needed to be done if the insurgency were to be stemmed. During the rest of 1962 and much of 1963, the Americans judged the Strategic Hamlet Program a success. Statistical measurements – a key indicator for numbers-oriented Kennedy national security planners – suggested upward progress. ‘Every quantitative measurement we have shows we are winning this war’, McNamara announced.120 Between December 1962 and August 1963, according to one estimate, the number of strategic hamlets had doubled to more than 7,000.121 Senior MACV officers expressed some support for the program, albeit in familiar military language. As Harkins told Diem in May 1963 that some eight million South Vietnamese were ‘securely tucked away’ behind barbed wire in their strategic hamlets, adding that the Viet Cong had become ‘like a rat caught in a trap’.122 By some US government estimates, the Civil Guard and the SDC were performing well. Curiously, SDC units under ecclesiastical leadership seemed to be particularly capable, and even outfought the ARVN on occasion. Such units, according to one International Development (AID) advisor in Vietnam, ‘appeared to be relatively well organized and to have a reasonable standard of morale. This was particularly true of units commanded by Catholic priests’.123 American assistance, Rusk declared in May 1963, was helping South Vietnam ‘take an honored place among modern nations as it rids itself of the enemies

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gnawing at its vitals’.124 And although he would later emerge as a critic of American policy in Vietnam, Thompson during 1962 and 1963 displayed an American-style optimism, at least in his dealings with senior US officials.125 In a meeting with Kennedy in April 1963, Thompson informed the president that much progress had been made in the Strategic Hamlet Program, and that the resulting improvements in rural security might very well permit a reduction in US military advisory personnel.126 The alarm the strategic hamlets caused amongst the Politburo in Hanoi suggested that the program was in fact enjoying some success. The insurgents in the South continued to make gains. However, in the Politiburo’s judgement, the Strategic Hamlet Program threatened to slow down the progress of the insurgency, and PLAF commanders received instructions from Hanoi to penetrate and destroy the fortified hamlets.127

‘Ridiculous representatives of Mr Diem’ Ultimately, however, the strategic hamlets never proved to be a serious obstacle to the insurgents, who by infiltration and destruction managed to ‘liberate’ threequarters of them.128 Large numbers of young men fled the hamlets to join the guerrilla forces.129 The program effectively ended with the coup that toppled Diem on 1 November 1963.130 During its short life, the program failed to achieve the security and nation-building objectives laid out for it by its American patrons. Hilsman and Thompson attributed the failure to mismanagement, poor implementation, and over-expansion.131 In Malaya, the British authorities had created a mere 400 New Villages; the Diem regime, on the other hand, was planning to establish as many as 12,000 strategic hamlets. As Anthony Short has correctly concluded, the Saigon government ‘tried to do too much too fast’.132 The program’s partisans also singled out the pernicious influence of the president’s brother, the sinister Nhu. Indeed, Nhu and his wife, Tran LeXuah, became the objects of intense American animosity. Mme Nhu appears to have had a mesmerizing effect on a number of influential Americans. McNamara, White House advisor Arthur Schlesinger, and Wesley Fishel, the former head of the Michigan State University advisory program in Vietnam, characterized her in sexualized ‘dragon lady’ language reminiscent of Ian Fleming or a Sax Rohmer at their most clichéd: ‘lovely and serpentine’; ‘diabolical and scheming – a true sorceress’; and ‘brilliant, vivacious, bitchy, and brutal in her Borgia-like fashion’.133 While over-expansion and the Diem family’s machinations contributed to the failure of the Strategic Hamlet Programme, these factors provide only part of the explanation. Hilsman and Thompson had identified the South Vietnamese paramilitary forces as central to the effort’s success. Yet throughout 1962 and 1963, the Civil Guard and the SDC remained ill-equipped, badly trained, and poorly motivated, and unable to provide local security. Colby paints a vivid portrait of the forces responsible for rural security: [They] had to make do with ancient weapons, without shoes, and without communications even to advise when they were attacked … [T]heir nightly

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maneuver was limited to closing the barbed wire around their pathetic fort and waiting for morning in hopes that Communist guerrillas would ignore them as they went about the organization, exhortation, and direction of their fellow villagers.134 In the words of one Vietnamese peasant, the paramilitary forces ‘could not even protect themselves, their training was so bad. How could they protect the people? What ridiculous representatives of Mr Diem’.135 The United States had been training and equipping the Vietnamese paramilitary forces since the mid-1950s. Kennedy, like Eisenhower before him, had identified such forces as important to America’s effort to create and maintain an anti-communist bastion south of the seventeenth parallel. Kennedy had also stressed the key role of paramilitary forces in his administration’s broader counter-insurgency strategy to contain the communist challenge throughout the developing world.136 Yet despite such high-level US government attention, and a protracted program to strengthen Diem’s paramilitary forces, the Civil Guard and the SDC failed to live up to American expectations. Part of this shortfall can be blamed on US military advisors, and an institutional mindset that believed conventional military operations were the key to defeating the communist insurgency. The MAAG had waged a protracted bureaucratic struggle to gain the right to train the paramilitary forces, and by March 1963, the MACV was responsible for 81,000 guardsmen and 80,000 members of the SDC.137 However, with the US military advisors focused primarily on organizing, training and equipping the Vietnamese army, American assistance to the paramilitary forces was half-hearted at best.138 ‘Winning hearts and minds’ was the slogan of the counter-insurgency strategists, but for MACV, the guiding principle remained ‘search and destroy’.139 For Harkins, the paramilitaries were a distraction and a drain on the manpower of the regular army.140 The Americans ‘appeared only to be interested in the [Vietnamese] Army’, a British observer concluded in July 1962.141 This attitude was absorbed by MACV’s Vietnamese pupils. According to a former ARVN officer, personnel serving in the paramilitary forces ‘were regarded as inferior … Very simply, the Americans didn’t think they were very important, and neither did their Vietnamese counterparts’.142 The inadequacies of the Civil Guard and the SDC were also a by-product of Diem’s desires for a large conventional military force. Diem had long been determined to thwart coup attempts by building up the Civil Guard as a counterweight to the ARVN.143 At the same time, however, Diem was committed to developing a strong, capable army. Resources were limited, and the South Vietnamese president was willing to sacrifice a robust paramilitary capability to ensure the development of the ARVN. The inability to fashion capable paramilitary forces in South Vietnam illustrates an inadequacy in the Kennedy counter-insurgency policy. That policy never provided a clear understanding of the roles and missions of foreign paramilitary forces. Officials in Washington responsible for developing police assistance policy generally defined paramilitaries as civilian organizations, albeit with some

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specialized and violent responsibilities, such as suppressing strikes, riots, and banditry. The Pentagon, on the other hand, tended to see these forces not in law enforcement terms, but largely as additional manpower to support conventional military organizations.144 While Kennedy strategists did not believe US military assistance would be required to defeat every insurgency, they did accept that US military advisors often had an important counter-insurgency role to play. However, Kennedy policy never acknowledged the tension between military and civilian approaches to combating insurgency. Administration counter-insurgency doctrine failed to recognize that the individuals responsible for carrying out military assistance were deeply wedded to war-fighting concepts that ignored or minimized the role of nonmilitary internal security forces, as demonstrated in Vietnam. Kennedy policy highlighted the importance of paramilitary forces for containing or defeating an insurgency, and it was assumed that US military officers would simply go along. In reality, American military leaders paid lip service to the new White House ideas, and to the Strategic Hamlet Program, but remained committed to an American style of war that considered paramilitary forces as secondary in the struggle against insurgents. In short, the Civil Guard and the SDC were the victims of what Hilsman correctly characterized later as a struggle between the competing military and civilian approaches to the insurgency – a competition never recognized adequately in Kennedy administration doctrine.145

Conclusion In his classic study of American bureaucratic politics, Morton H. Halperin observed that an ‘organization’s essence [emphasis in original] is the view held by the dominant group in the organization of what the missions and capabilities should be’.146 During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the organizational essence of the US army centred on ‘mid-intensity’ conventional warfare, including the lavish use of firepower designed to minimize ‘friendly’ casualties.147 This approach shaped the army’s advisory role in Vietnam, where it sought to transform the ARVN into an American-style ground combat force. However, this stress on creating a conventional fighting force had perverse consequences for American internal security policy. Due in part to the influence of the British advisory mission in Vietnam, Kennedy placed the strategic hamlet concept at the centre of his administration’s counter-insurgency strategy. That approach meshed with the modernization theorizing touted by some of his advisors, who emphasized a more political approach to defeating the communist insurgency. As conceptualized by administration officials like Hilsman, the Strategic Hamlet Program relied on Vietnamese paramilitary forces to provide security for the new rural institutions. Yet for the MACV, these forces were at best a distraction from the real business of preparing the ARVN for conventional combat. MACV’s training for the paramilitary forces focused on conventional military tactics and techniques, and in characteristic American fashion, avoided any political indoctrination, despite the heavily ideological nature of the South

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Vietnamese conflict. As two former ARVN generals have correctly concluded, the paramilitary forces ‘should have been made conscious of their duties and responsibilities toward … local security and above all the reasons why they fought’.148 Ultimately, the US army, ‘hard-wired’ to organize, train, and equip troops for ground combat, was the wrong institution for the role the Kennedy administration assigned to it.

7

American universalism and the ‘triumph of technique’ The Kennedy administration and civilian police reform in South Vietnam

Introduction Strengthening Diem’s paramilitary forces, as part of the Strategic Hamlet Program, was the most prominent aspect of the Kennedy administration’s internal security assistance program in South Vietnam. That program also included a parallel effort to bolster Diem’s civilian police forces, most notably the Municipal Police and the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation (VBI). Yet by the time of Diem’s overthrow in November 1963, US police aid had been no more successful than it had under the Eisenhower administration. The country’s rural population had no civilian police protection, the subversive activities of the communistdominated National Liberation Front (NLF) continued unabated, and the forces themselves remained poorly organized, badly trained, and ill-equipped.1 To date, scholars have made no systematic attempt to explain the failure of the US civilian police reform program in Vietnam during the 1961–3 period. Early accounts that mentioned the program’s shortfalls focused on the lack of official US focus and the misallocation of resources.2 To be sure, the United States during and before the 1961–3 period did devote far more attention to the Diem regime’s armed forces. However, this provides only part of the explanation. More recent studies have added to our understanding by suggesting that the internal political dynamics of the Diem regime helped frustrate American police assistance objectives.3 This chapter will build on earlier work by introducing additional factors. As J. Garry Clifford has correctly observed, ‘any foreign policy that engages the separate attentions of multiple agencies and agents should alert the historian to the bureaucratic politics perspective’.4 Briefly stated, that perspective holds that no one individual makes policy, and that conflict rather than consensus characterizes the policy-making process.5 In the case of Vietnam, the bureaucratic politics approach helps explain the continuing inability to expand the police, a central goal of American police assistance policy. This chapter will also examine shortcomings in broader aspects of administration’s internal security assistance policy. Strengthening the Vietnamese army and building the civilian police were both important US objectives. However, Vietnamese manpower was limited, and American policy offered no guidance on

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how this limited resource was to be divided between Diem’s military and police forces. Administration policy also failed to recognize an important contradiction inherent in the approach to policing advocated by US internal security advisors. American police trainers simultaneously supported ‘cop-on-the-beat’ and a more militarized form of policing. Yet as the British were to discover in Malaya, it was impossible for one police force to perform both simultaneously. Finally, this chapter will expand on a theme introduced in earlier chapters. For US police advisors in Vietnam during the 1961–3 period, as for American trainers during the Eisenhower era, policing was considered to be an inherently apolitical activity, and law enforcement problems were defined in largely technical terms. Reflecting the dominant liberalism of mid-century America, police advisors believed that replicating US public safety institutions and techniques was the solution to South Vietnam’s law enforcement shortfalls. Such an approach was problematical, however. The advisors’ technical remedies were based on assumptions about the legitimacy of the Diem regime and the illegitimacy of its Vietnamese adversaries. American police trainers overlooked the repressive aspects of the police they were supporting, and how activities like spying on dissidents and collecting taxes conflicted with the American goal of establishing professional, service-oriented police institutions.

Bolstering Diem’s civilian police In the view of the US leadership, South Vietnam’s civilian police agencies had a critical role to play in the inter-related requirements of counter-insurgency and nation-building.6 However, after more than five years of continuous US assistance, the Americans were confronting what was in effect a blank slate. Diem’s civilian police agencies were as unimpressive in 1961 as they had been when Diem first came to power in 1954. Vietnam’s law-enforcement personnel lacked the most rudimentary skills, such as the ability to investigate crimes, conduct routine patrols, and gather and maintain fingerprints and other records on offenders. Police coverage in Vietnam’s urban areas was scant and limited to the nation’s larger cities, while in Vietnam’s villages and hamlets, a uniformed police presence was non-existent.7 Policing aimed specifically at identifying and controlling subversive elements was similarly inadequate, as evidenced by the continued growth of the NLF.8 By fiscal year 1961, the United States was committing $8.9 million a year to support Vietnam’s civilian police.9 Police assistance was a relatively small piece of the $400 million a year in military and economic aid Washington was providing to Saigon, but it represented a significant portion of the Kennedy administration’s overall police assistance budget for the developing world.10 During fiscal year 1961, that aid totalled $13 million. Of the 32 countries receiving American support, only Thailand approached Vietnam in terms of the level of aid it received11. A close American ally and a staunch member of the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the kingdom faced an unstable neighbour across the Mekong River in Laos and a nascent insurgency in the country’s

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north-east.12 In Vietnam, twenty American police advisors were assisting law enforcement agencies, and the recruitment of twenty additional US personnel was underway.13 Robert Thompson’s advisory mission, funded by the British government, was also advising Diem’s police organizations on security-related matters. By fiscal year 1963, fifty-four Americans were assisting Municipal Police, Customs and Harbor Police, the VBI, and senior officials at National Police headquarters in Saigon.14 Two US government organizations had responsibility for police assistance activities, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Public Safety Division (PSD) of the United States Operations Mission (USOM) in Saigon. Although the VBI conducted criminal investigations, its primary function was to monitor and disrupt organizations the regime considered subversive. Its agents ‘use[d] intelligence collection, political data [and] dossiers compiled from census data … to separate the bad guys from the good’, according to one US police advisor.15 As with the Michigan State University Group (MSUG) during the 1950s, the PSD in the early 1960s lacked the skills needed to advise the VBI on counter-subversive and counter-intelligence tactics and techniques, such as surveillance, intelligence analysis, and interrogation.16 The CIA again supplied the requisite expertise.

The CIA and Diem’s police During the 1950s, the CIA established close relationships with internal security organizations in Latin America and the Near East, including the Shah of Iran’s secret police, the SAVAK.17 By the early 1960s, the CIA was training approximately 1,450 foreign police each year in counter-subversive techniques at a cost of roughly $2 million.18 The agency provided technical and material assistance with the expectation that intelligence information would be given in return. CIA assistance to foreign security forces paid significant dividends, according to the Johnson Committee on police assistance, which concluded in July 1962 that such support led to a ‘highly profitable relationship with Free World police and internal security services’.19 In Vietnam, the CIA supplied the VBI with training and equipment in exchange for information on unspecified ‘developments in the countryside’, according to William Colby.20 The CIA also appears to have aided the Service des Études Politiques, Économiques et Sociales (SEPES), the political intelligence apparatus under the control of Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, that spied on regime opponents.21 However, after forty years, most aspects of the CIA’s support to Diem’s internal security organs remain official US secrets. What is available in the public domain is generally limited to discussions of the CIA’s involvement with MSUG police training activities, and even that is confined largely to recollections by former university participants. Thus, any examination of the US government’s support for Diem’s civilian security agencies must necessarily focus on the program carried out by the PSD, whose records have largely been declassified.

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The PSD and police assistance During the early 1960s, PSD advisors undertook a variety of measures aimed at improving the ability of Diem’s police forces to perform basic public safety activities. These steps included the creation of law enforcement training centres, the completion of a police telecommunications network, and the establishment of a highway patrol and a harbor police.22 US police trainers also continued work on a national identification card program, an effort begun by MSUG advisors that was intended to identify and monitor Viet Cong cadre and recruits.23 American police assistance during this period had three other areas of focus: reorganization, the expansion of Vietnamese police manpower, and the strengthening of police firepower. These activities were significant in that they serve to illustrate the factors that contributed to the failure of the Kennedy administration’s internal security program for South Vietnam. The re-organization and manpower expansion efforts reflected the tendency of US police advisors to define Vietnam’s public safety challenges in familiar American terms, even as the communist insurgency was making substantial gains in the countryside. The manpower program also illustrates the fact that US police advisors and their counterparts in the Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) and its successor, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), sometimes worked at cross-purposes and in ways that frustrated internal security objectives. Finally, militarizing the police represented a blurring of law enforcement and law enforcement roles and missions, and conflicted with the Kennedy administration’s conception of civilian police as instruments of nation-building and modernization.

Police re-organization A PSD review carried out in 1961 concluded that the proliferation of police agencies, and the lack of centralized control over them, was a major obstacle to the development of capable and modern law enforcement in South Vietnam. The root of the country’s police problems was the ‘[d]uplication of authority, multiplicity of command, excess spans of control, [and] inadequate record systems’, according to Arthur Z. Gardiner, the USOM director.24 This complaint was a familiar one. Since the mid-1950s, US police advisors had sought to consolidate and rationalize the regime’s police agencies and put them under the control of a single civilian leader. In 1961, as in 1955, the country’s 38 province chiefs maintained operational control over Municipal Police and VBI operations and personnel in their jurisdiction. In essence, Vietnam had 38 separate police entities. The result, in the judgement of Frank Walton, the PSD director, was ‘fragmentation of activities and … the absence of clearly defined lines of responsibility and authority’.25 In the hopes of clearing up these hazy lines of police authority and chaotic administration, American police advisors advocated the creation of a national police service, a move also recommended by Thompson.26 Thompson would later claim that the Americans ignored his advice on police reform.27 However, Thompson and his American colleagues shared a strong belief in bureaucratic

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rationalization and efficiency. The zeal with which Washington embraced Thompson’s ideas about rural security in South Vietnam suggest that he and the Americans were not as far apart in their approach as he implied. For advisors to urge the creation of a national police agency might at first appear to be contrary to American and British traditions, since both countries had decentralized and locally based police structures. Both countries had rejected the establishment of a national criminal police force at home, fearing that a nationwide law enforcement agency would endanger civil liberties.28 That said, both countries, since shortly before the First World War, had maintained domestic security organizations that operated at the national level. In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) combated espionage, rounded up enemy aliens, and fought inter-state crime.29 In Britain, the Security Service (‘MI5’) infiltrated subversive organizations, rooted out spies within the armed forces, and vetted personnel for sensitive positions in government and industry. Unlike the FBI, MI5 was not a law enforcement agency, although the service worked closely with the police Special Branch to carry out surveillance and arrest suspects.30 The imperatives of the Cold War played a part in the American decision to promote the rationalization of foreign security forces. In the context of the global struggle against communism, decision-makers adopted a more pragmatic attitude about what was appropriate for threatened friends and allies in the developing world. In the view of national security planners in Washington, Third World countries like Vietnam – backward, unstable and menaced from within by subversion and insurgency, and from without by communist powers to the north – could illafford the luxury of decentralized police structures like those found in the United States and Britain.31 The US initiative, unlike the many related police reform strategies advanced under during the Eisenhower years, had a positive reception in the presidential palace. On 27 June 1962, Diem issued a decree that consolidated the Municipal Police and the VBI into a single organization, the National Police, whose directorgeneral reported directly to the Interior Ministry.32 The Vietnamese president had long resisted schemes aimed at re-organizing, consolidating and centralizing his internal security apparatus, and why Diem would eventually take US (and British) advice is unclear, although there are several plausible explanations. It is possible that in the face of the growing communist insurgency, Diem may have simply come to accept arguments about the need to reduce overlapping and confusing command-and-control arrangements. Diem may have also agreed to the consolidation plan as a concession to his American patrons, who for seven years had been urging Diem to undertake political, military, social and economic reforms. Counter-balancing the power of the ARVN may also have entered into Diem’s calculations.33 Finally, Diem, under increasing pressure from his communist and non-communist adversaries, may have come to appreciate the greater repressive potential of centralized internal security organs. However, if an improved capability for repression was Diem’s motivation, the Anglo-American advice and support may have unintentionally contributed to the downfall of his regime. As Walton was to

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acknowledge in a memorandum he wrote soon after the 1 November coup, the Diem regime had frequently employed the police in ‘Gestapo-like operation[s] with midnight arrests, holding without charge, brutality, and detentions in secret locations’.34 Possession of a consolidated and presumably more efficient internal security force may have emboldened Diem to launch the campaign against Buddhists, students and other opponents during the spring and summer of 1963 that led ultimately to his overthrow the following November.

Expanding the police The second major thrust of the American police advisory effort focused on increasing the number of civilian law enforcement personnel. Walton noted in May 1961 that the Municipal Police, with 9,000 men, and the VBI, with 7,700 personnel, were expected to provide routine law enforcement, investigate serious crimes, and thwart subversive activity in a country of some 12,000,000 people.35 The force was chronically over-stretched, with many policemen routinely working sixteen-hour shifts.36 The police were also expected to participate in counterinsurgency oriented activities. Halting the flow of recruits, food and weapons to the Viet Cong – ‘resource control’, in the parlance of counter-insurgency, had become an important police priority – but the civilian forces lacked adequate numbers of trained personnel to conduct this mission.37 By 1963, despite efforts to increase the size of the civilian force, the police were growing by only 2,821 men a year.38 The chronic manpower shortage probably was beyond the ability of the Americans to solve. The Vietnamese population regarded Diem’s police as brutal, incompetent and corrupt. Although the police presence outside the country’s larger cities was minimal, their behavior in the rural areas had earned them a reputation for venality. Police were sometimes employed to collect taxes and rents, and even more routine duties, such as manning roadblocks and checking identity papers, offered ample opportunity for corruption. Police were also frequent targets for assassination.39 Given such an environment, it is difficult to see how the Vietnamese police service could hope to attract first-rate candidates. However, American policies also played a part in the continued police manpower shortfalls. Police were scarce, but many found themselves relegated to guard duty and other extraneous activities. American officials insisted that Vietnamese police be assigned to guard duty at MACV headquarters, the embassy, USOM offices, motor pools, and billets for senior American personnel. The Saigon Municipal Police, with a force of just 6,000 men, was compelled to allocate 1,500 policemen to guard American office buildings, cars and residences. The MACV rejected repeated pleas by public safety advisors to use military personnel rather than scarce policemen to guard their facilities.40 ‘Because of additional demands for static post assignments’, Walton concluded in March 1964, ‘[the police] have, in effect, actually lost personnel’.41 MACV’s success in having Saigon’s meager civilian police assigned to guard duty at American facilities demonstrated the imbalance in bureaucratic power

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between US military personnel and USOM’s police advisors. Tensions between military advisors and civilian police advisors had existed since the mid-1950s. Senior military commanders in Vietnam like General Paul D. Harkins and Lt. General Samuel T. Williams had strenuously opposed police-oriented approaches to the country’s security threats. Edward Lansdale, back from Vietnam and serving in the Pentagon as an advisor on special operations, informed Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara that the Vietnamese considered Gardiner ‘a nice man who has fallen asleep in our climate’.42 PSD advisors, for their part, often viewed their American military counterparts with contempt. ‘The average military advisor makes no sacrifice and contributes little’, a PSD trainer told a colleague in December 1961. The typical military officer, he added, lived in a ‘heavily guarded MAAG compound which is equipped with a bar, deep-freezer, refrigerators, movies and hi-fi’, and lived in eager anticipation of leave in Hong Kong, where he could stock up on ‘Rolex watches, Harris tweeds … and other fancy items’.43 Since World War II, the US military had come to exercise increasing influence over American foreign policy.44 This bureaucratic ascendancy, and the growing ability of the armed forces to shape American policy toward the developing world, was evident in Vietnam, where the MAAG and then MACV frustrated attempts to implement non-military measures against the insurgency. Civilian counterinsurgency strategists, as well as public safety advisors in Vietnam, stressed that guerrillas were only a symptom. The underlying problem, they argued, was the underground political structure that directed and supported the communist combatants. In focusing exclusively on defeating armed Viet Cong units, MACV was neglecting the root causes and political infrastructure that were sustaining the guerrillas. As a result, noted a PSD advisor in July 1963, ‘[t]he larger spasms of pain from the cancer of Communism are suppressed; the disease is not being treated or cut out’.45 American military assistance policy in Vietnam, albeit unintentionally, made it more difficult to recruit civilian police and create a larger and more capable force. The United States supplied vast resources to the Vietnamese army in the hopes of creating a modern and professional military force. But this assistance had the unforeseen consequence of reducing the prestige and attractiveness of the police forces. American actions helped shape indigenous perceptions about Vietnam’s security forces. As Thompson would later observe, the ARVN ‘naturally attracted all the best young men into its officer ranks. With the army getting the cream, the remaining government services had to make do with skimmed milk’.46 The ARVN, according to Dale Andradé, received ‘most of the money, most of the talented manpower … and all the prestige. Only the dregs went into the police’.47 The Kennedy administration’s counter-insurgency policy had little to say about how resources should be allocated between military support and assistance to civil forces and institutions. Nor did that doctrine explain to police advisors how indigenous civilian internal security forces in a place like Vietnam should go about competing with military forces for recruits, or whether such competition

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for manpower was advisable or practicable. Absent such direction, PSD personnel were forced to make do with such recruits as the police service was able to attract. In sum, the Kennedy administration’s internal security policy overlooked the difficult bureaucratic milieu in which the police assistance component was expected to operate. Policy-makers in Washington failed to take into account the fact that the views of the US military, the organization possessing the largest budget and the most personnel, would in bureaucratic conflicts tend to prevail over those of the more modestly endowed civilian agencies. MACV’s bureaucratic hegemony, as demonstrated with the diversion of limited police resources, allowed the US military to run roughshod over American civilians laboring to achieve important non-military objectives. That said, it is not clear that the larger police force envisioned by the PSD would have been sufficient to achieve American objectives. Police advisors sought a manpower level based on a US peacetime criterion that was inadequate for Vietnam in the early 1960s. Using what he described as the American standard of three policemen per 1,000 population, Walton estimated in May 1961 that South Vietnam required a police force of 36,000.48 During the next two years, the PSD revised that figure upward to 60,000. However, that higher force level, even if it had been reached, probably would have been inadequate, given the size of the country and the extent of the insurgency. In Malaya during the Emergency, the British authorities assembled a force of 60,000 men to police a country with a far smaller population of 6.1 million people.49 Vietnam, according to one leading British counter-insurgency strategist of the time, needed a civilian force of at least 100,000 in the countryside alone.50 Although Thompson would later conclude that he and his colleagues in Malaya had overestimated that country’s policing requirements, he agreed that the force levels proposed by the Americans were inadequate. In his judgement, Vietnam even under peacetime conditions needed at least 50,000 civilian police.51 The American policemen sent to advise Diem’s police saw Vietnam through a lens that was a product of mid-twentieth century American law-enforcement practices. The yardstick used by Walton might have been appropriate for a nation like the United States, which faced no significant internal security threats. But Vietnam in the early 1960s clearly was not anything like the United States. With an estimated 25,000 main-force guerrillas operating in the countryside, and 1,000–2,000 assassinations a year (the equivalent of 15,000–30,000 in the United States), South Vietnam was a country wracked by violence and instability.52 ‘The situation has deteriorated to the point where it is impossible for the US government to effectively attain our mutual security objectives’, a public safety advisor concluded in March 1961.53 By August 1963, according to the PSD’s own estimates, more than one million South Vietnamese were serving as guerrillas or actively supporting insurgent activities.54 In such an environment it probably was unrealistic of the American advisors to expect 36,000 police to contribute in any significant way to maintaining order and fostering development.

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Militarizing the police The growth of the insurgency created a dilemma for American police advisors. As eager as they were to develop civilian law enforcement institutions, they also recognized that lightly armed police, particularly in the countryside, the area of the insurgency’s greatest strength, were likely to be overwhelmed by aggressive and disciplined communist guerrilla forces. American military critics of policeoriented counter-insurgency strategies had argued that police and paramilitary forces were no match for the PLAF. American police advisors eventually reached the same conclusion. The Viet Cong’s strength was apparent every time PSD personnel left Saigon. Guerrilla ambushes were a routine feature of the environment in Vietnam’s hinterlands.55 Few civilian police were operating in rural areas, but what few there were encountered a communist adversary who was often better trained and equipped. Villages controlled by the PAVN were virtual no-go areas for Diem’s law enforcement agencies.56 The Civil Guard, Self-Defense Corps (SDC), and village militias, were receiving generous American assistance to provide security for the Strategic Hamlet Program.57 The paramilitary forces, however, failed to halt communist violence in the countryside.58 PSD personnel responded to the rural violence by militarizing the police. The US advisors, who had been supplying the police with shotguns, handguns and rifles, now equipped them with more powerful small arms, and during 1962, more than 1,000 police received combat training in the use of the 0.45 caliber submachine gun.59 A village radio system created by the PSD was used not just to summon police reinforcements, but to call in artillery fire during PLAF attacks.60 Villagers evidently valued the radios highly. During an attack on an SDC post in October 1962, a resident ‘attempted to save his radio with it under his arm’, according to a PSD advisor, who added that ‘[h]e was shot down on the edge of a canal. His body was recovered the next morning. He still had the radio under his arm’.61 Finally, PSD personnel established a combat police force, a quasi-military National Police unit designed to engage in small-unit operations against the insurgents.62 Heavily armed police, it was hoped, would be able to defend themselves as they attempted to apprehend communist cadre ensconced in the country’s myriad hamlets. By the late 1960s, this unit, which would be renamed the National Police Field Force (NPFF) achieved some success in the joint AmericanVietnamese campaign against the Viet Cong’s rural political apparatus, the so-called ‘Viet Cong infrastructure’ (VCI).63 The militarization of the police highlights an element of conceptual confusion surrounding the Kennedy administration’s approach to policing in Vietnam, and by extension, the other nations where the United States was supporting local police institutions. American police advisors in Saigon, and officials at the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), and its successor, the Agency for International Development (AID), the State Department, and the White House had envisaged two roles for international police assistance to the developing world. On the one hand it was intended to contribute to the creation of modern

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state institutions and in so doing foster political, social and economic development. Police, in providing an environment of law and order, would help secure this transition to modernity.64 At the same time, Kennedy administration decisionmakers saw foreign police assistance as a critical and more overtly repressive weapon in the American counter-insurgency arsenal. Properly organized, trained and equipped, civilian internal security forces would root out subversive elements before they metastasized into a full-blown insurgency. Under the Kennedy doctrine, those security forces were also expected to engage in more violent activities, such as riot control and the suppression of banditry and, should insurgency erupt, in limited operations against armed adversaries. As demonstrated in Vietnam, Kennedy administration policy failed to recognize the fundamental tension between the ‘cop-on-the-beat’ style of law enforcement required for nation-building and the more repressive, military-like approaches mandated by counter-insurgency doctrine. It is difficult, if not impossible, for police forces to accomplish both, since the equipment, training and organizational and operational ethos for these roles and missions is dramatically different. Typically, police live among the population they serve, are lightly armed, operate as individuals or in very small units, employ powers of arrest, and seek to bring criminals to justice. The military, on the other hand, traditionally live in barracks separate from the general public, operate in larger formations, are heavily armed, and seek to destroy their adversaries through the force of arms.65 Although Washington saw the British campaign in Malaya as a model for counter-insurgency, the administration overlooked an important aspect of the British approach. The British explicitly acknowledged the inherent conflict between civilian law enforcement and counter-insurgency-oriented policing, which in Malaya took the form of paramilitary ‘jungle operations’. A report prepared by the British Police Mission to Malaya in March 1950 described the tension between the two approaches to policing: The policeman must be helpful to members of the public; he must develop the qualities of forbearance and restraint … His whole bent must be towards preserving the framework of law and order within which civil life goes on. The contrast between that bent and the attitude of mind required for war-like objectives is such that training for jungle operations can do little or nothing to develop the habits of thought and action required for ordinary police work.66 A decade later in Vietnam, the Americans, in their rush to militarize the police, blurred this distinction. With an insurgency that was raging across the countryside, it no doubt appeared sensible to devote police assistance resources to more military-oriented missions. The danger of course was that in so doing the more ‘benign’ aspects of policing would be pushed aside. Police organized, trained and equipped to engage communist guerrillas would in all probability lack the ‘qualities of forbearance’ and the ‘habits of thought and action’ necessary to operate as rural constables. Although writing about the British police in the 1990s, John D. Brewer’s warning about the dangers of police militarization are equally applicable

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to Vietnam in the early 1960s. In embracing a more repressive approach to public order, police ‘run the increasing risk of being viewed more generally as a force rather than as a service’.67

American universalism and Vietnam Writing to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in April 1962, Hilsman, the director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, described in blunt terms the inadequacy of civilian policing in Vietnam’s countryside. It was, he said, ‘weak, misdirected, or simply non-existent’. In effect, Hilsman was conceding that the previous seven years of American police assistance had accomplished next to nothing. Hilsman’s prescription was a re-conceptualization of the police as something more than just a mechanism for enforcing Diem’s laws. The insurgency had reached a point where that no longer was enough. What was required, he told Kennedy, was a police agency that also complemented the army and the paramilitary forces by filling what he termed a ‘vital gap’ in internal security coverage. Going beyond conventional law enforcement, rural police should have a new flexibility that allowed them to conduct a range of operations. Thus, Hilsman wrote, the police must also ‘have capabilities for dealing with minor civil disorders … [and they] must be ready to act as a grass-roots intelligence network’.68 Hilsman’s description of the woeful state of rural policing was accurate. However, given the difficulty of creating a force capable of carrying out even the most rudimentary law enforcement duties, Hilsman probably was expecting too much when he urged rural police to shoulder the additional burden of riot control and intelligence gathering. Hilsman’s new concept did not contribute to any dramatic redirection in American policy. What makes his paper of particular interest is a passing comment that reveals some important assumptions underlying the Kennedy approach to assistance to civilian police agencies abroad. Hilsman suggests that his proposal ‘illustrates basic principles which can quickly and easily be applied elsewhere, for example in Colombia’.69 The remark hints at the universalistic aspirations embedded in the administration’s foreign internal security program. American national security strategists viewed the communist threat in the developing world as all-encompassing. All nations undergoing modernization were at risk from communist-inspired subversion that sought to exploit the political, social and economic tensions generated by the development process. Specifics were irrelevant; Third World nations, and by extension, their American patron, faced what was essentially an identical problem. If the challenge was global, and basically the same in Colombia, Vietnam or Iran, it followed that the remedy for each country could be roughly the same. A truly universal template ultimately proved elusive, since such a framework ignored local conditions that worked against the prescriptive measures introduced by American advisors. Nevertheless, New Frontier strategists like Hilsman continued to search for the philosopher’s stone that would allow the United States to thwart the communist offensive across the so-called ‘underdeveloped areas’.

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That quest reflected a prominent feature of late-twentieth century American liberal ideology. Since the nineteenth century, liberalism had universalistic aspirations. Liberalism, in Irving Louis Horowitz’s words, ‘spoke of freeing mankind as a whole’.70 In the aftermath of the Second World War, and the emergence of what became known as ‘the American Century’, the United States had come to see itself as the supreme manifestation of liberalism and the liberal sensibility. Reduced to its most significant components, that ideology in mid-century stressed the centrality of democratic institutions, the importance of the free market, and at least a rudimentary social safety net. Americans were also committed to the notion that their liberal institutions, belief structures, and values could and should be replicated abroad.71 Liberalism’s urge to transplant itself would reach its apogee under Kennedy. In Latin America, the administration made a determined effort to promote constitutionalism, elections and the rule of law as antidotes to the continent’s sorry and illiberal procession of coups d’etat and military dictatorships.72 That region was hardly the only recipient of the American liberal prescriptions. Vietnam, too, was the subject of an intense effort to reform that country’s institutions along lines that reflected liberal American ideals and preferences. Administration officials had long urged Diem to create a more stable and pluralistic political order by broadening his political base and accommodating, or at least tolerating, his non-communist opponents.73 Senior military and political figures defined Vietnam’s political problems and proposed remedies in terms lifted directly from American domestic political discourse. Lansdale lamented to McNamara in January 1961 that there were ‘practically no George Washington’s [sic], Tom Jefferson’s [sic[ or Tom Paine’s [sic] in Saigon today’.74 Senator Mike Mansfield urged the Vietnamese to adopt American-style campaign practices and called upon Diem ‘to develop close personal ties with the people by a continuous [Vice President Lyndon] Johnson-like shirt-sleeve campaign from one end of the country to the other’.75 The American answers to Vietnam’s social and economic challenges had a decidedly progressive tenor reminiscent of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Johnson, following a May 1961 trip to South Vietnam, urged what he called a ‘vigorous and integrated attack on the economic, social and other ills of the Vietnamese peoples’ that included Tennessee Valley Authority-like hydroelectric projects.76 Similarly, Eugene Staley, a Stanford Research Institute scholar sent by Kennedy on an economic mission to Vietnam the following month, advocated programs intended to foster what Staley called ‘a self-sustaining economy and a peaceful, free society’.77 Through the promotion of higher education, improved public administration practices, and support for new instruments of mass communication such as television, the United States attempted to approximate in Vietnam America’s own political, social and economic infrastructure. This approach had serious pitfalls. In the words of George K. Tanham, who served as a US rural development advisor during the early 1960s, the United States ‘tried to create the Vietnamese government, army and other institutions in our own image, often without regard for, or understanding of, how the Vietnamese

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operated’.78 Diem himself was to complain frequently that the presence of large numbers of American advisors was creating the popular perception that Vietnam had become a satrapy of the United States.79 Questions about the appropriateness of measures developed by a country with very different historical experiences, practices and attitudes went unasked.80 This is perhaps not surprising, given that the Kennedy administration was operating at the height of America’s post-war power and self-confidence. South Vietnam, in the view of administration policymakers, was young and unsophisticated, but with the right amount of American support and encouragement, was deemed capable of joining the ranks of modern, democratic nations, albeit as a decidedly junior partner.81 This impulse focused on promoting American norms within South Vietnam’s political, social and economic spheres. In the judgement of the men who designed and carried out that program, American advisors, tempered by liberal ideas about democratic control and the rule of law, had at their disposal the most advanced policing techniques, practices and procedures. American law enforcement standards were the yardstick by which indigenous police forces would be assessed and the template that would be employed to mould Third World police. That image was expansive enough to embrace British police paradigms, since Britain was considered the wellspring of a political and legal tradition that included the United States. American public safety advisors were directed to instruct their students in the developing world in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ approaches to policing,82 and in the case of Vietnam, Washington supported more direct British involvement in the form of Thompson’s internal security advisory assistance to the Diem government. The use of US police manpower levels as a basis for determining Vietnam’s police personnel requirements was one example of the American penchant for applying US approaches to Vietnam’s peculiar conditions. American advisors in Vietnam, like decision-makers in Washington, were guided by a faith in reason and a belief that all problems were fundamentally technical and therefore solvable. Kennedy-era officials embodied a sensibility characterized by Roger S. Whitcomb as the ‘triumph of technique’, that is ‘a certain infatuation with means [and] a great faith in the efficacy of techniques in problem-solving’.83 This belief in the central importance of technique had deep American roots. Those roots had been refreshed by influential ‘end of ideology’ theorists who argued during the late 1950s and early 1960s that the fundamental problems facing the United States were largely technical in nature.84 Since America, as the supreme liberal democratic state, stood at the apex of the development process, it made sense that practices that worked so well at home could be exported readily to meet challenges in benighted areas like South East Asia. In the case of police assistance, American techniques and approaches were transmitted to the Vietnamese through courses such as ‘Police Organization and Operations in the US’.85 Public safety advisors also instructed the Vietnamese in areas such as juvenile delinquency control, traffic law enforcement, and municipal police administration.86 Such courses reflected the public-order concerns of a prosperous liberal democracy at peace, in which teenage lawbreaking, speeding

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and efficient police management were the most pressing law enforcement problems. Instruction and support that at first glance appeared to be outside this paradigm were in fact components of long-standing American police traditions. Riot control was hardly alien to the American police experience, and seemingly novel counter-insurgency techniques, such as resource-control, in fact fit in nicely with the long American history of law-enforcement operations against bootleggers, rum-runners, and smugglers.87 Whether this instruction had any real benefit for the Vietnamese police is open to question. Although US officials, as good bureaucrats, kept meticulous records of ‘inputs’ – that is, funds expended, weapons supplied, and hours of instruction given – there was little systematic effort to assess the effectiveness of American support. It seems clear, however, that American instruction was often parochial and sometimes verged on the solipsistic. One British official observed in 1958 that a New York State policeman serving as a Civil Guard advisor urged the force ‘to set up an organization similar to that obtaining in New York when the settlers were fighting the Red Indians. He had been given books about it!’88 More important, the Americans carried out their program of instruction in a self-imposed political vacuum. In the view of the PSD advisors, they were mere ‘technicians’ sent to solve a problem by establishing modern, professional, and apolitical civilian law enforcement agencies. American personnel focused on imparting skills in areas like fingerprinting, bookkeeping, and the use of small arms, and they ignored more politically charged law-enforcement issues like the role of police in a democracy, the appropriate use of force, and police–military relations. Side-stepping these higher-order questions was perhaps understandable, given the advisors’ conception of themselves as simple technicians, the likelihood that any exploration of these questions would alienate Vietnamese political authorities, and the difficulty of instilling more liberal law enforcement methods in police operating under an authoritarian regime. However they saw themselves, the US police advisors were in fact more than simple technicians seeking to avoid offending their Asian hosts. The police assistance program, while ostensibly value-neutral and technical in nature, was based on a set of implicit political beliefs about the Diem regime. For the American police trainers, the legitimacy of the Diem government was no more open to question than was the government of the state of New Jersey. This view was shared and reinforced by policy-makers in Washington, at least until the summer and autumn of 1963, when Diem’s relentless repression, refusal to reform, and inability to defeat the insurgency led the Kennedy administration to abandon his regime.89 If the Diem regime was legitimate, it followed that the Vietnamese opposition was illegitimate. The use of violence by the insurgents further reduced their legitimacy in the eyes of the Americans. Although the United States had a bloody past, and had fought a civil war a mere century earlier, most Americans in the 1950s and 1960s subscribed to a consensus-orientated creed that rejected violence as a legitimate instrument for bringing about political and social change. Indeed, radical politics and revolution of any kind were rejected as threats to orderly political, social and economic development.90 What is more, these rebels – in Vietnam or

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anywhere else in the developing world – were deemed to be alien intruders who exploited local grievances and who in turn were ripe for exploitation by Moscow or Beijing.91 The perceived legitimacy of Diem, and the illicit nature of his adversaries, led the Americans to develop an assistance program based on the mindset that viewed all government opposition, particularly in its violent forms, as inherently illegitimate and thus worthy of harsh countermeasures. American public safety advisors in Vietnam saw the need to develop indigenous police forces capable of suppressing any and all overt manifestations of organized opposition to the Diem regime. Vietnamese police, according to a PSD report prepared in January 1961, must be able to suppress strikes and demonstrations, since these ‘can lead to riot and this is a direct step to insurgency … Arrest of riot or civil disturbance leaders, before, during and after these disturbances prevent organized resistance to government’.92 Policing is an inherently political activity, involving fundamental questions of power, authority and legitimacy.93 Those questions had been resolved at home, at least as far as US law enforcement was concerned. In the opinion of the PSD advisors, they had also been answered in Vietnam, and in Diem’s favor. However, Diem’s adversaries, including the communist insurgents, rejected this conclusion. The armed struggle raging in the countryside was in essence a conflict over who would rule and who would make and enforce the country’s laws. PSD advisors operated behind a value-neutral façade, but in deeming all opposition to be illegitimate, and in helping to strengthen the regime’s internal security apparatus, they were de facto partisans for the Saigon government. The set of beliefs among US police advisors described above – the fundamentally apolitical nature of policing, the legitimacy of the Diem regime, and the illegitimacy of its adversaries – contributed to shortfalls and distortions in the American civilian police assistance program. American advisors, in insisting that policing was essentially non-political, blinded themselves to the fact that Diem employed the police in his brutal campaign against Buddhists, students and other non-communist opponents of his rule. During the summer of 1963, the United States reduced aid to South Vietnam in part to restrict Diem’s ability to employ the police for such purposes.94 But American public safety advisors never came to terms with the fact that the forces they were organizing, training and equipping were above all instruments of a regime that was seeking to prolong its rule, whatever the costs. In defining all opposition to Diem as inherently illegitimate, and helping the police to develop means to crush any manifestation of dissent, the American advisors bolstered Diem’s ability to persecute his opponents. At the very least, the American advisors might have recognized that Diem’s use of policing for explicitly political and repressive purposes conflicted with American police ideals and was helping to subvert the US goal of establishing a modern, professional police presence in Vietnam’s hinterlands. PSD advisors maintained that the Vietnamese police should be, in the words of a November 1963 memorandum, ‘an organization dedicated to service to and protection of the

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people of Vietnam’.95 Yet the American personnel acquiesced to the regime’s use of police to spy on peasants, collect taxes, extract rents, and harass farmers at checkpoints. Such activities could hardly have been expected to promote respect for authority, the rule of law, public support for the police, and other law-enforcement values cherished by the Americans. A belief in the legitimacy of the Diem regime, and the corresponding illegitimacy of its adversaries, and a commitment to the notion that American ideals and institutions could be replicated abroad blinded the US police advisors, and led them to promote nostrums that had little chance of succeeding.

Conclusion Within a month of the 1 November 1963 coup, PSD advisors had established cordial relations with the new minister of security overseeing the National Police. With apparently invincible optimism, the PSD assured its superiors in Washington that more progress was being made than ever before.96 In reality, Vietnam’s post-Diem civilian police were no more capable than they had been before the coup.97 American assistance would take a new tack, stressing what the PSD termed ‘humane but firm’ police practices and ‘professional, “peopleoriented”, competence’ in all of South Vietnam’s cities and rural areas.98 But the force remained crippled by its traditional inadequacies. Although officials in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson insisted that the ‘revitalisation’ of the Vietnamese police had been underway since 1964, AID conceded in 1966 that little real progress had been made. Using language largely identical to that used by American officials throughout the Diem years, an AID report concluded that ‘[m]anagement needs strengthening; leadership is thin, and frequent shifts further weaken efficiency’.99 Documents not available to the US Congress, the press or the public offered even more candid assessments. One White House official, writing in May 1966, concluded that US assistance efforts in Vietnam ‘have been unable since 1955 to construct an effective national police force’.100 Under Kennedy, three aspects of the administration’s police assistance policy in South Vietnam proved particularly troublesome. First, that policy failed to acknowledge the conflict between preparing police for routine, peacetime law enforcement and preparing police for more violent operations against guerrillas. As the British discovered in Malaya, police can do one or the other, but not both simultaneously. Second, administration policy failed to take conflicting US institutional imperatives into account. As was the case with the Strategic Hamlet Program, the US military had a distorting effect on the civilian police assistance effort. Increasing the size of the police was an urgent priority for PSD advisors, but MACV’s drive to strengthen the Vietnamese army forced the police to compete with the military for recruits. Two US priorities were at odds, and administration policy offered no guidance on how these opposing positions should be reconciled. Finally, police advisors mistakenly sought to impose American law enforcement prescriptions on a fragile developing country

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wracked by insurgency and instability. This approach was borne of a mid-century American liberalism that sought to export US institutions abroad, and a belief that solutions to even the most intractable problems lay in the application of apolitical, value-neutral techniques.

Conclusion

During the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, the United States identified communist subversion and insurgency as critical challenges to American interests in the developing world. For both administrations, foreign internal security forces were important instruments in their global struggle to thwart communist designs in the global South. With Eisenhower’s 1290-d initiative in December 1954, internal security assistance became a routine tool of American statecraft, replacing the ad hoc and intermittent US support to foreign police and paramilitary forces that had taken place during the first half of the twentieth century. Kennedy, who shared many of Eisenhower’s fundamental assumptions about the nature of the Marxist-Leninist threat, approached the Third World with a heightened sense of urgency. As part of a broader counter-insurgency campaign, Kennedy assigned to internal security assistance an enhanced role in combating communist revolution. The government of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam was the single largest recipient of US police and paramilitary assistance during the 1955–63 period. In Vietnam, as in other free world countries that received American internal security aid, the United States had two inter-related objectives: helping the regime suppress subversive threats, and building police and paramilitary organizations that would contribute to nation-building. Both Eisenhower and Kennedy saw the loss of Vietnam as a serious blow to America’s international position, and they supplied substantial military assistance and foreign aid to bolster the Diem government. Yet despite eight years of sustained American effort, the United States was unable to create the police and paramilitary forces it believed were essential to maintain a modern, anti-communist bastion below the seventeenth parallel. Identifying the factors that contributed to this failure has been the goal of this book. Three themes have emerged in the preceding chapters: (1) the bureaucratic conflicts surrounding the competing civilian and military approaches to South Vietnam’s internal security; (2) the role of universities in carrying out US policy; and (3) the belief in the universal applicability of the American policing model. American advisors brought with them to Vietnam an array of institutional and cultural baggage that helped shape US policy and programs. These factors alone were not responsible for the shortfalls in the American internal security assistance strategy. As is stressed throughout the study, weaknesses within the South Vietnamese government, the strength of the communist opposition, and Diem’s political

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maneuvring contributed to America’s inability to achieve its objectives. However, these three themes, which are reviewed in turn below, offer insights into the deficiencies of the American response to communist revolution in South Vietnam and, more generally, help illuminate gaps in the overall US strategy for employing Third World internal security forces to combat subversion and insurgency.

Bureaucratic conflict American military and civilian advisors entertained competing notions about what was required to ensure the survival of the Diem regime. During the second Eisenhower administration, the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), under the leadership of Lt. General Samuel Williams, saw the armed forces of the communist regime in the North, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), as the paramount threat. Products of the Second World War and the Korean conflict, US army officers advising the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) during the late 1950s stressed conventional military operations and dismissed guerrillas as distractions from the central task of preparing for armed conflict with the North Vietnamese army. For the civilian police advisors attached to the Michigan State University Group (MSUG), developing a police force in the countryside was the central task. The university police trainers conceptualized the Civil Guard as a modern police force that would serve Vietnam’s rural population. MSUG advisors resisted plans by the MAAG and Diem to transform the Civil Guard into an auxiliary to the ARVN, fearing that the move would make permanent the absence of law enforcement services in the countryside. By the late 1950s, the MSUG had lost the battle to transform the guard into a rural police agency. The MAAG’s success was a testament to the bureaucratic power enjoyed by the US military. Williams operated independently of the US ambassador, Elbridge Dubrow, nominally the senior US official in the country. Williams dealt with Diem as a peer, and defying Dubrow earned the MAAG commander only the mildest of official rebuke. The imbalance of power between US civilian and military advisors continued during the Kennedy administration, when the United States embraced the Strategic Hamlet Program as the centrepiece of America’s counter-insurgency strategy for Vietnam. The paramilitary Civil Guard and Self-Defence Corps (SDC) were intended to play an important role, both in terms of providing rural security and as part of a broader nation-building agenda. Yet the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), the successor to the MAAG, never fully supported the use of the paramilitary forces for hamlet defense. The US military’s program for defeating the insurgency, which stressed the generous use of firepower and ‘search-and-destroy’ missions, was at odds with the Kennedy administration’s emerging counter-insurgency strategy, which emphasized economic assistance, police aid, and propaganda over the use of military force. In seeking to create a mirror image of the US army, the MACV helped shape Vietnamese perceptions of the country’s military and its non-military security forces. American military advisors held the guard and SDC in low regard.

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Sophisticated modern armed forces, with a divisional structure and equipped with powerful weapons, was the ideal for conventional US military officers during the 1950s and 1960s. The Vietnamese absorbed the message transmitted by their American advisors, and they tended to view the paramilitary forces with contempt. Diem reinforced the American message by using the guard as a dumping ground for sub-par officers. The actions and policies of the US military advisors had important implications for the American police and paramilitary assistance program. The greater prestige of the ARVN made it more difficult to find suitable recruits for the internal security forces. MACV’s insistence on having South Vietnamese police guard American military installations placed severe strains on law enforcement manpower. More broadly, the conflict between civilian police trainers and military advisors highlighted a serious gap in the Kennedy administration’s counter-insurgency strategy. Police and paramilitary forces were expected to play an important role in helping threatened regimes defeat subversion, insurgency, and other forms of instability. Yet administration policy never recognized the inevitable tension between the police component of counter-insurgency, which stressed the development of civilian law enforcement institutions, and the military component, which saw police and paramilitaries as adjuncts to conventional armed forces.

Universities and national security The link between American universities and the national security establishment was forged during World War II, when scientists and engineers developed radar, devised powerful analytic techniques like operations research and, most dramatically, created the atomic bomb. ‘As never before in history’, John Marks has observed, ‘the warring powers sought ideas … that could make the difference between victory and defeat’.1 During the early 1950s, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the California Institute of Technology, and other universities became major Department of Defense (DOD) contractors.2 In the case of Michigan State University (MSU), the university went beyond providing advice to the US government and conducting applied research on military technology. Eager to enlist his university in the global struggle against communism, MSU’s president helped secure a contract to provide internal security assistance to the fledgling Diem government. The relationship made sense to all of the parties involved. For MSU, it was an opportunity to contribute directly to the American cause in the Cold War. Diem, for his part, welcomed MSU’s involvement, having worked as a consultant at the university’s East Lansing, Michigan campus during his exile from Vietnam in the early 1950s. To the US government, MSU seemed an ideal partner. The Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) had recently created a foreign police assistance organization, but qualified police advisors were in short supply. MSU, with its links to the Eisenhower administration, and its well-regarded police administration program, seemed well positioned to conduct training operations in South East Asia.

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From 1955 until 1962, in what must be considered one of the most curious episodes of the Cold War, an American university assumed responsibility for transforming backward, ill-trained, and poorly equipped foreign police and paramilitary forces into modern, capable internal security units. During the 1960s, as anti-war sentiment swept American campuses, MSU was pilloried for its role in assisting the repressive Diem regime. Anti-war critics would single out the MSUG’s relationship with the CIA, which used the university as a cover for its involvement with the Sûreté, an investigative force with a counter-subversive mandate. In fact, the CIA’s support to the Sûreté (also known as the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation, or VBI) was a relatively small component of the overall police assistance program. By the end of the 1950s, the university was eager to end its involvement with Diem’s security forces. The reasons behind MSU’s growing unease with its activities in South East Asia foreshadowed the full-scale revolt against academic ties with US national security agencies that emerged during the following decade. Specifically, university personnel became troubled by their support of a regime that had once held great promise as a legitimate non-communist and nationalist representative of the Vietnamese people, but had by the late 1950s revealed itself as increasingly autocratic, unstable, and repressive. MSUG’s concerns about supporting a dictatorial regime were echoed within the Eisenhower administration, and led to a greater emphasis on the promotion of legal and judicial reform within the Overseas Internal Security Program (OISP), the successor to 1290-d. The MSUG episode had significant implications for the Eisenhower administration’s foreign internal security assistance policy. Like the university itself, the International Cooperation Administration (ICA, the successor to the FOA), had by the late 1950s grown uneasy with MSUG’s role in South Vietnam. In Washington, ICA officials criticized the university’s poor performance in advising the Sûreté in counter-subversive techniques, suggesting correctly that academics were ill-suited to the task of instructing organizations on the finer points of ferreting out the Diem regime’s adversaries. More broadly, the ICA was troubled by the fact that a nongovernmental organization was providing assistance in a field as sensitive as internal security. The lack of MSUG’s counter-subversive qualifications, and the belief that the provision of such support was a US government responsibility, were the motivations for enlisting the CIA to train the Sûreté. By the end of the decade, MSU came to share the view that the university was an inappropriate vehicle for helping to meet what one ICA consultant termed ‘abnormal law and order requirements in a revolutionary situation’.3

The Kennedy Administration and social science During his farewell address to the nation, Eisenhower famously warned about the growing power of the military-industrial complex. He also drew attention to increasing government penetration of academic life, and cautioned that the ancient tradition of university independence from the state was in jeopardy. However, as was demonstrated during the Kennedy administration, a compelling

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argument could be made that penetration was taking place in both directions. At the dawn of the New Frontier, policy-oriented intellectuals were eager to prove their utility, and decision-makers were receptive to their messages.4 To burnish his image as a man of ideas as well as action, and to create an inhouse cadre of practical thinkers, Kennedy brought into the White House a group of so-called ‘action intellectuals’, including Walt W. Rostow, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Roger Hilsman. Rostow served as a transmission belt for then-fashionable social science nostrums, most notably, modernization theory. The theory, which posited that all societies move in a unilinear progression from a primitive state to modernity, appeared to be a powerful tool for explaining the post-colonial turbulence underway in the developing world. In offering a totalistic and materialistic explanation for economic growth, modernization theory was the mirror image of the Marxist-Leninist creed it sought to refute. Communists, in Rostow’s formulation, were ‘the scavengers of the modernization process’.5 Hastening fragile societies through this process would reduce the amount of time they were vulnerable to communist stratagems. Modernization theory, as Rostow and Hilsman interpreted it, served as the foundation for counter-insurgency doctrine, the administration’s response to communist revolution in the Third World. Although Kennedy would be closely identified with the birth of counter-insurgency, the doctrine was an outgrowth of American approaches to instability that stretched back into the Eisenhower administration and beyond. The United States had engaged in nation-building in Central America and the Caribbean throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, and under Truman the country had waged politico-military campaigns in Greece and the Philippines. What was new under Kennedy was a self-conscious effort to fashion a formal doctrine for counter-revolutionary operations, and the theoretical patina for such activities that modernization theory provided. As articulated by Rostow and Hilsman, thwarting subversion and insurgency would require, inter alia, the enhancement of the power and presence of state institutions in the developing world. It is here that modernization theory, counterinsurgency, and foreign police and paramilitary assistance converged. Internal security forces, properly organized, trained and equipped with US assistance, would serve a dual role. As guardians of the state, they would prevent or control illegitimate violence, and in so doing, protect the on-going modernization process from communist exploitation. As representatives of the state, the security forces (particularly the police) would serve as a visible sign of the state’s presence and its concern for the well-being of its people. Energizing the bureaucracy to embrace police and paramilitary assistance as a key component of counter-insurgency proved to be a major challenge. Kennedy was deeply suspicious of the US government’s national security decision-making apparatus, preferring like Franklin Roosevelt to make foreign policy within a small circle inside the White House. With some justification, Kennedy officials like Robert W. Komer criticized the ICA and its successor, the Agency for International Development (AID), for undervaluing police assistance programs and focusing instead on traditional economic development measures. Komer, an

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energetic Harvard Business School alumnus, became engrossed in organizational questions surrounding the provision of public safety assistance. Like Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, another Harvard Business School graduate, Komer was enamoured with technique and supremely confident in the belief that proper organization and sound analytic techniques could solve even the most intractable problems at home and abroad. However, Komer and other decision-makers responsible for developing policy failed to examine some of their fundamental assumptions about internal security forces, nation-building, and counter-insurgency doctrine. The Kennedy White House embraced the British campaign during the Malayan Emergency as the key to solving the riddle of revolutionary violence. To be sure, Special Branch and other police agencies could claim much of the credit for the successful prosecution of the war against the Malayan Communist Party. At the same time, Komer and his colleagues ignored the fact that Britain conducted itself as a colonial power, and unlike Americans in any comparable situation, was not forced to wage the conflict indirectly through indigenous leaders, forces, and institutions. Reinhold Neibuhr observed in 1952 that the framers of US national security policy viewed themselves as ‘tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection’.6 Rostow, Hilsman, and Komer believed in the universal applicability of the American model, which they saw as key to promoting development and defeating communism in the developing world. This belief was certainly not unique to the Kennedy era, although the New Frontier gave it a new theoretical guise. If the United States was at the apogee of the modernization process, it followed that it was both possible and desirable to create versions of American institutions abroad. In Vietnam, the United States would attempt to replicate its own social, political, and economic infrastructure, including police institutions.

The American police model American officials responsible for securing the free world against communist subversion believed that replicating US institutions abroad would help inoculate local governments against the Marxist-Leninist virus. Transplanting US approaches to policing was at the centre of the US campaign during the late 1950s and early 1960s to refashion Diem’s internal security forces. American advisors believed in the universal utility of the US police experience, insisting that what worked in Detroit, San Jose or Milwaukee would work equally well in Saigon, Hue, or Nha Trang.7 The American model for policing, like the US archetypes for industrial production and other large and complex enterprises, stressed the use of modern technology, merit-based promotion, and operational efficiency. Programs of instruction for the Municipal Police and other agencies reflected the preoccupations of American law enforcement officials at mid-century, such as traffic control, juvenile delinquency, and efficient record keeping. American advisors based their estimates for the appropriate size of Vietnam’s Municipal Police on a US standard, despite the fact that Vietnam, unlike the United States, was a new and unstable country wracked by insurgency.

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MSUG advisors attempted to bring to South Vietnam law enforcement management principles that, while appropriate for US conditions, met stiff resistance within the Diem government. As Diem’s brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, concluded, the South Vietnamese regime’s adversaries included ‘not only communists but foreigners who claim to be our friends’.8 The MSUG’s rationalistic reform schemes for the Civil Guard, Sûreté, and the Municipal Police did not adequately consider the political environment in which Diem operated. Efforts by American police advisors to professionalize the police through routine assessments, and the MSUG attempts to stop the constant rotation of the senior leadership of the internal security forces, conflicted with Diem’s desire to keep his police and paramilitary units divided and off balance. The American advisors’ approach to South Vietnam’s internal security forces was based on the assumption that policing was inherently a non-political activity. This apolitical strategy was characteristic of the American approach to foreign assistance during the Cold War. The US administrators of the Marshall Plan for Europe, for example, ‘tried to transform political problems into technical ones that were solvable … [by] American methods of scientific management’, as Michael J. Hogan has observed.9 In Vietnam, American police advisors routinely referred to themselves as ‘technicians’, reflecting the notion that the services they provided were purely technical in nature. Such thinking meshed with modernization theory, which deemed politics mere ‘epiphenomena’ floating above a deeper, unchanging, and universally consistent societal and cultural foundation. But as the Americans were to recognize belatedly in Vietnam, policing was in fact a highly politicized activity. Diem routinely employed his police and paramilitary forces to brutally repress his adversaries, and in providing support, US advisors contributed indirectly to the downfall of the regime they had intended to bolster. Finally, the American internal security assistance program in Vietnam demonstrated the difficult, if not insurmountable, challenge of transforming foreign police and paramilitary forces. Ensuring public order, monitoring dissent, and controlling subversion are among the most sensitive activities of any government, as they involve fundamental questions of legitimacy, freedom, and power. No regime will readily allow foreigners to meddle in organizations in a way that challenges established authority, or threatens to overturn political arrangements. ‘[S]ome fields are too sensitive or too close to the power centers within government to permit successful university technical assistance activities’, Ralph Smuckler, a former MSUG chief advisor, concluded in 1966.10 Remaking internal security forces abroad was demanding enough when the recipient nation was at peace. The problems were heightened in the case of Vietnam, where Diem faced a highly motivated and disciplined adversary determined to destroy his government. This book has explored the factors that contributed to the failure of American foreign internal security assistance policy in Vietnam during the 1955–63 period. If that policy had succeeded, would the United States have been able to achieve its broader objective of ensuring the survival of a free, independent, and anticommunist state? If the South Vietnamese police and paramilitary forces had

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been more capable in dealing with what US Secretary of State Dean Rusk termed ‘the enemies gnawing at [Vietnam’s] vitals’, would the country’s future have been any different?11 It seems unlikely that any one element of the overall American assistance program, however successful, could have prevented or contained the communist insurgency. The Diem government’s weaknesses were endemic, and went well beyond the regime’s inability to maintain internal security. As J. Bowyer Bell has concluded, ‘[t]here was no cohesion, no loyalty to the center, no center … [only] the illusion of legitimacy’.12 Although the country had all the trappings of a modern state, its existence was wholly dependent on the continued support of a foreign power. South Vietnam was essentially a synthetic state whose economic, military, and political resources were supplied by the United States. The Diem government, despite the authentic nationalism of its leader, remained in the eyes of most Vietnamese ‘My-Diem’ (American-Diem), a US puppet with no independent viability.13 Where the South Vietnamese government was weak, the communist resistance was strong. Well-organized, well-trained, and highly disciplined Viet Cong militants, backed by a ruthless and determined regime in North Vietnam, exploited popular discontent in the South in a way that would have been difficult, if not impossible, for Saigon and its American backers to overcome. Modern and professional police and paramilitary forces, no matter how capable, could not have been expected to defeat the highly motivated revolutionary movement that fed off the Diem regime’s systemic weaknesses. The history of the conflict after Diem’s downfall in November 1963 highlighted the limited ability of police and paramilitary forces to thwart South Vietnam’s communist revolution. During the late 1960s, as the United States moved away from a conventional ‘big war’ strategy, policy-makers placed more emphasis on the use of indigenous police, intelligence, and unconventional military forces to root out the communist political infrastructure in the countryside. Despite some success against the insurgent movement, the new approach ultimately failed. As during the Diem era, the Saigon government, riddled by corruption and still totally dependent on its American patron, failed to develop a base of popular political support among the Vietnamese population.14 Today in Iraq, the United States has come full circle. Seeking to defeat a powerful insurgency, Washington faces a formidable challenge that shares many of the features of the Vietnamese struggle during the Diem era: a largely indigenous guerrilla movement; a government heavily reliant on the United States for its survival; and weak state institutions, including undertrained, undermanned, and under-equipped internal security forces. The American prescription is largely the same as it was in Vietnam during the 1954–63 period: train a conventional army for external defence, and re-establish public-safety forces that will contribute to both counter-insurgency and state-building. Finally, in Iraq, as in Vietnam, the American program for promoting internal stability is deeply and perhaps fatally flawed, and for many of the same reasons. The Iraqi police force remains far too small to ensure public safety or combat subversion. Under the administration of

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Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the US ‘proconsul’ in Baghdad, the internal security assistance effort was plagued by the ‘lack of money, and interagency friction, and lack of understanding of what needed to be done – it was almost the kiss of death’, according to one press account.15 As in Vietnam, American attempts to impose a ‘US-style police curriculum on one of the world’s oldest cultures’, has met widespread resistance.16 More broadly, Washington appears entranced by what John Gray, in another context, termed a ‘peculiar inverted Marxist eschatology’,17 namely the belief that American institutions, representing the apogee of human progress, can and should be exported to Iraq and the wider Middle East. It is of course too soon to say with any certainty what the outcome in Iraq will be. In the meantime, it would be wise to approach that country’s internal security problems with modest expectations – expectations based on scepticism about the universal applicability of the American model, and a proper recognition of the limits to US power.

Appendix Intelligence documents denied under the Freedom of Information Act

1

Memorandum to Collins re: Security Forces in Vietnam, 26 January 1955, J. Lawton Collins Papers, Special Mission to Vietnam, box 28, folder marked ‘Lansdale, Edward G. (Colonel)’ (2), Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. 2 Document dated 24/11/64, Record Group [RG] 286, folder marked ‘IPS#101/Intelligence/VN [Vietnam]’, FLDR [folder] II6364, National Archives at College Park, Maryland (NACP). 3 Document dated 12/09/64, RG 286, folder marked ‘IPS#10-1/Intelligence/ VN’, FLDR II6364, NACP. 4 Document dated 23/12/64, RG 286, folder marked ‘IPS#10-1/Intelligence/ VN’, FLDR II6364, NACP. 5 Document dated 15/03/65, RG 286, folder marked ‘IPS#10-1/Intelligence/ VN’, FLDR II6364, NACP. 6 Document dated 00/03/63, RG 286, folder marked ‘IPS#10-1/Intelligence/ VN’, FLDR II6364, NACP. 7 Document dated 01/04/63, RG 286, folder marked ‘IPS#10-1/Intelligence/ VN’, FLDR II6364, NACP. 8 Document dated 11/06/64, RG 286, folder marked ‘IPS#10-1/Intelligence/ VN’, FLDR II6364, NACP. 9 Document dated 10/06/64, RG 286, folder marked ‘IPS#10-1/ Intelligence/ VN’, FLDR II6364, NACP. 10 Document dated 19/06/64, RG 286, folder marked ‘IPS#10-1/Intelligence/ VN’, FLDR II6364, NACP. 11 Document dated 02/12/64, RG 286, folder marked ‘IPS#10-1/Intelligence/ VN’, FLDR II6364, NACP. 12 Document dated 25/11/64, RG 286, folder marked ‘IPS#10-1/ Intelligence/ VN’, FLDR II6364, NACP.

Notes

Introduction 1 2 3

4

5 6 7 8

9

J.L. Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations, New York: p. 112. F. Colburn, The Vogue of Revolution in Poor Countries, pp. 4, 14. A useful account of Eisenhower’s foreign assistance policy can be found in B. Kaufman, Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953–1961 Significant studies of Eisenhower’s use of propaganda and psychological operations include K. Osgood, ‘Form before Substance: Eisenhower’s Commitment to Psychological Warfare and Negotiations with the Enemy’, Diplomatic History 24, 2000; and W. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961. For more on the role of intelligence and covert operations in Eisenhower’s national security policy, see C. Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush, (New York: HarperPerennial, 1995), Chapter 6. Significant studies include D. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present, Chapter 3; D.M. Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of US Counterinsurgency Policy, Chapters 2–4; and R. Hilsman, To Move a Nation: the Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy, Chapter 28. A useful recent account of Kennedy’s foreign and defense policy can be found in L. Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. A. Hills, Policing Africa: Internal Security and the Limits of Liberalization, p. 4. Although they have slightly different connotations, the terms ‘police and paramilitary assistance’, ‘internal security assistance’, and ‘public safety assistance’ will for stylistic reasons be used interchangeably throughout this book. Early research includes R. Bruce, ‘Training Foreign Police at the International Police Academy: The U.S. Office of Public Safety’s Failed Attempt at CrossCultural Diffusion;’ and T. Lobe, ‘U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World’. See for example M. Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America; R. Holden, ‘Securing Central America Against Communism: the United States and the Modernization of Surveillance in the Cold War’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 41; and D. Rempe, ‘An American Trojan Horse? Eisenhower, Latin America, and the Development of US Internal Security Policy, 1954–1960’, Small War and Insurgencies 10. Vietnam historiography is vast. For useful overviews of its terrain, see N. Graebner, ‘The Scholar’s View of Vietnam, 1964–1992’, in D. Showalter and J. Albert (eds), An American Dilemma: Vietnam, 1964–1973; G. Hess, ‘The Unending Debate: Historians and the Vietnam War’, in M. Hogan (ed.), America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; and J. Dunn, ‘In Search of

148

10

11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21

Notes Lessons: The Development of a Vietnam Historiography’, in L. Matthews and D. Brown Assessing the Vietnam War. For surveys of the conflict, see M. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990; R. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975; and G. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. Useful accounts of US policy-making on Vietnam can be found in P. Kattenburg, The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945–75; W. Gibbons, The US Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, 4 vols.; and D. Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War. Accounts of assistance under Eisenhower include R. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960, pp. 320–7, 349–57; and D. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961, pp. 136–73. The scholarly literature on Kennedy administration support to Vietnamese police and paramilitary forces is far thinner. The topic is touched on in D. Andradé, Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War, Chapter 7; and R. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds, Chapter 2. See for example A. Joes, The War for South Vietnam, 1954–1975, pp. 64–5. P. Busch, ‘Britain and Kennedy’s War in Vietnam, 1961–1963’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Recent studies in this area include S. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America. This literature includes Andradé, Ashes to Ashes; Hunt, Pacification; H. Neese and J. O’Donnell (eds), Prelude to Tragedy: Vietnam 1960–1965, Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2001; and R. Shultz, Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi: Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam. US Department of State [DOS], Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003, Washington: DOS, April 2004, pp. 161–3. See for example Laurel Miller and Robert Perito, ‘Establishing the Rule of Law in Afghanistan’, United States Institute of Peace, Special Report 117, March 2004; and Richard W. Stevenson, ‘Seeing Threat to Iraq Elections, US Seeks to Shift Rebuilding Funds to Security’, New York Times, 15 September 2004, p. 12. During the 1990s, American-led ‘peace operations’ in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans led to some analytical interest in the topic of foreign police assistance, but relatively little official government attention or preparation for the future, as demonstrated by subsequent events in Afghanistan and Iraq. For examples of this earlier interest, see R. Oakley, M. Dziedzic, and E. Goldberg (eds), Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security; and W. Rosenau, ‘Peace Operations, Emergency Law Enforcement, and Constabulary Forces’, in A.H. Chayes and G. Raach (eds), Peace Operations: Developing an American Strategy. See for example J. Dobbins, et al., America’s Role in Nation-Building From Germany to Iraq, MR-1753-RC, Santa Monica, California: RAND Corporation, 2003. For two sides of this debate, see Francis Fukuyama, State-Building: Governance and Order in the Twenty-First Century, Ithaca; and John Gray, ‘Global Utopias and Clashing Civilizations: Misunderstanding the Present’, International Affairs 74. R. McMahon, ‘The Study of American Foreign Relations: National History or International History’, in M. Hogan and T. Paterson (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, p. 15. F. Logevall, ‘“Bringing in the Other Side”: New Scholarship and the Vietnam Wars’, Journal of Cold War Studies 3, p. 93. For more on the difficulty of gaining access to and using these archives, see M. Bradley and R. Brigham, ‘Working Paper #7: Vietnamese Archives and Scholarship on the Cold War Period: Two Reports’, Cold War International History Project.

Notes 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34

35

149

These include J. Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province; Tran Dinh Tho, Pacification, Indochina Monographs, Washington: US Army Center of Military History, 1980; and J. Trullinger, Jr., Village at War: An Account of Revolution in Vietnam. See the appendix for a list of the documents denied under FOIA. O. Marenin, ‘United States Aid to African Police Forces: The Experience and Impact of the Public Safety Assistance Programme’, African Affairs 85, p. 528. O.W. Wilson, and R. McLaren, Police Administration, 3rd edn. T. Marks, Making Revolution: The Insurgency of the Communist Party of Thailand in Structural Perspective, Studies in Contemporary Thailand No. 3, p. 3. H. Humphrey, ‘Building on the Past: Lessons for a Future Foreign Policy’, in A. Lake (ed.), The Legacy of Vietnam: The War, American Society and the Future of American Foreign Policy, p. 365. J. Clifford, ‘Bureaucratic Politics’, in Hogan and Paterson (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. For examples of the use of the bureaucratic politics model in political science, see G. Allison, The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis; and M. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy. S. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford, p. 8. For more on the militarization of American scientific research during the Cold War, see D. Kevles, ‘Passing the Buck’, The New Republic, 30 September 2002, pp. 27–33. For a useful if tendentious discussion of broader aspects of the Cold War relationship between the universities and the state, see N. Chomsky, et al., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science, p. 8. In the field of American diplomatic history, relevant examples include M. Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy; and M. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and Nation Building in the Kennedy Era. For discussions of the role of ideational factors in international relations theory and security studies, see W. Wohlforth, ‘A Certain Idea of Science: How International Relations Theory Avoids the New Cold War History’, Journal of Cold War Studies 1; and M. Desch, ‘Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies’, International Security 23. M. Hunt, ‘Ideology’, in Hogan and Paterson (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, p. 196. For more on American counter-insurgency and nation-building in El Salvador, see B. Schwarz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador: The Frustrations of Reform and the Illusions of Nation Building, R-4042-USDP, and W. Odom, On Internal War: American and Soviet Approaches to Third World Clients and Insurgents, pp. 85–110. See for example Walter Pincus, ‘Analysts Say Iraqi Agencies Unlikely to Follow U.S. Rules’, Washington Post, 10 May 2004, p. 20; and Mark Magnier and Sonni Efron, ‘Arrested Development on Iraqi Police Force’, Los Angeles Times, 31 March 2004, p. 1.

1 The struggle for the developing world 1

2

White House [WH], ‘Memorandum of Discussion at the 319th Meeting of the National Security Council [NSC], Washington, April 11, 1957’, US Department of State [DOS], Foreign Relations of the United States [cited hereafter as FRUS], 1955–1957, vol. XIX, National Security Policy, Washington US Government Printing Office [USGPO], 1990, p. 473. Quoted in R. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War, pp. 106–7.

150 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Notes J.L. Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations, p. 31; and J.L. Gaddis, ‘The Unexpected John Foster Dulles: Nuclear Weapons, Communism, and the Russians’, in R. Immerman (ed.), John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, 1990, p. 64. S. Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look, 1953–61, National Security Policy p. 2. R. McMahon, ‘The Illusion of Vulnerability: American Reassessments of the Soviet Threat, 1955–1956’, International History Review XVIII, p. 592. WH, 269th NSC Meeting, 8 December 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. X, Foreign Aid and Economic Defense Policy, p. 54. The New Look doctrine was first stated formally in NSC 162/2. The text of the document can be found in FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. II, National Security Policy, Washington: USGPO, 1984, pp. 577–97. H.W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War, pp. 54–6. R. Bowie and R. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy, p. 250. J.L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, p. 152. G. Hess, ‘The American Search for Stability in Southeast Asia: The SEATO Structure of Containment’, in Warren I. Cohen and Akira Iriye (eds), The Great Powers in East Asia, 1953–1960, p. 274. Eisenhower had long been an enthusiastic supporter of clandestine intelligence operations. For accounts of the administration’s covert actions, see J. Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, revised edn, pp. 259–69; and C. Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush, pp. 201–11. A. Rubinstein, Moscow’s Third World Strategy, p. 85. H.W. Brands, Jr., Cold Warriors: Eisenhower’s Generation and American Foreign Policy, p. 199. Operations Coordinating Board [OCB], ‘[Draft]Report to the National Security Council [NSC] Pursuant to NSC Action 1290-d’, 6 October 1955, p. 4, NSC Staff Papers, Box 17, folder marked ‘(File #2) (1) [Oct–Dec 1955]’, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas (cited hereafter as DDEL). The OCB, a unit within the NSC, developed and coordinated operational plans to carry out US national security policy. Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look Strategy, p. 168. V. Ruttan, United States Development Assistance Policy: The Domestic Politics of Foreign Economic Aid, pp. 72–3; and ‘Message from the President of the United States Relative to our Mutual Security Program’, 19 February 1958, reprinted in US Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Selected Executive Session Hearings of the Committee, 1957–60, vol. XIX, Mutual Security Program, Part 6, Washington: USGPO, 1987, p. 766. Brands, The Devil We Knew, p. 70. R. McMahon, ‘Introduction: The Challenge of the Third World’, in P. Hahn and M. Heiss (eds), Empire and Revolution: The United States and the Third World Since 1945, p. 7. WH, NSC 5501, ‘Basic National Security Policy’, 7 January 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. XIX, National Security Policy, pp. 27–8. Quoted in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 176. See for example C. Andrew and V. Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, pp. 181–3. Even the French communist party, traditionally the most pro-Soviet in Europe, experienced defections after 1956. F. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet, p. xi. T. Smith, ‘Third World Nationalism and the Great Powers’, in Paul Kennedy and William I. Hitchcock (eds), From War to Peace: Altered Strategic Landscapes in the Twentieth Century, p. 149.

Notes 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

151

See for example WH, ‘Operations Coordinating Board Report (January 7, 1959) on US Policy in Mainland Southeast Asia’, pp. 24–8, document no. 1982-191, online, available HTTP: (accessed 22 January 2001). This is the on-line service of the Declassified Documents Reference System [DDRS], Research Publications International, Woodbridge, Connecticut and Reading. The document number refers to the microfiche edition of the DDRS. Recent works on this subject include O. Westad (ed.), Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1954–1963, Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998, particularly Chapter. 5; and M. Kramer, ‘The USSR Foreign Ministry’s Appraisal of Sino-Soviet Relations on the Eve of the Split, September 1959’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, issues 6–7, pp. 170–85. Quoted in J.L. Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 181. Quoted in ibid., p. 187. For a representative discussion of subversion, see DOS, MacArthur to Hoover, 11 January 1955, p. 1, FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. X, p. 2. Ibid., p. 1. C. Waters, ‘A Failure of Imagination: R.G. Casey and Australian Plans for CounterSubversion in Asia, 1954–1956’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 45, 1999, p. 350. Dockrill, New-Look, p. 169. W. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776, p. 182. S. Browne, Foreign Aid in Practice, p. 16. See for example WH, ‘United States Objectives and Policies with Respect to the Arab States and Israel’, 24 April 1952, FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. IX, The Near and Middle East, p. 224. ‘Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Proposals Relative to our Mutual Security Programs’, 21 May 1957, reprinted in US Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Mutual Security Program, Part 6: Selected Executive Session Hearings of the Committee, 1957–60, vol. XIX, Washington: USGPO, 1987, p. 242. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953, Washington: USGPO, 1960, p. 513. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1949, Washington: USGPO, 1964, p. 18. J. Amuzegar, ‘Point Four: Performance and Prospect’, Political Science Quarterly 73, p. 532. B. Kaufman, Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953–1961, p. 3; and R. Watson, Into the Missile Age, 1956-1960, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, vol. IV, p. 657. US Congress, Senate, Special Committee to Study the Foreign Aid Program, Foreign Aid Program, Study No. 6: Administrative Aspects of United States Foreign Assistance Programs, report prepared by the Brookings Institution, March 1957, 85th Congress, 1st session, Washington: USGPO, 1957; and US Agency for International Development [AID], ‘A Brief History of Foreign Assistance’, online, available HTTP: (accessed 6 February 2002). Watson, Into the Missile Age, pp. 657–8. Browne, Foreign Aid, p. 20. Congress, Foreign Aid Program, pp. 430–1. Defense support ‘involves the provision of general supplemental resources which a recipient country requires if its economy is to support a defense program of the size which US policy regards as essential and if, at the same time, it is to maintain or attain the minimum level of economic

152

44 45

46 47

48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Notes strength or growth which is consistent with the US national interest’. NSC, ‘Status of the Mutual Security Program as of June 30, 1955’, FRUS, 1955–57, vol. X, p. 18. Watson, Into the Missile Age, p. 660. Although seldom defined in contemporaneous government documents or in the limited body of scholarly literature dealing with the subject, ‘paramilitary’ forces might usefully be defined as armed and uniformed civilian units, organized along military lines, with responsibility for public-order activities such as crowd control as well as military missions in time of war or other national emergencies. This definition is drawn from A. Scobell and B. Hammitt, ‘Goons, Gunmen, and Gendarmerie: Toward a Reconceptualization of Paramilitary Formations’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology 26, pp. 220–1. G. Wardlaw, Political Terrorism: Theory, Tactics, and Counter-Measures, p. 98. R. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975, p. 87. For a discussion on the role of counter-insurgency in the creation of state institutions in the developing world, see P. Rich and R. Stubbs, The Counter-Insurgent State: Guerrilla Warfare and State Building in the Twentieth Century. Foreign Operations Administration [FOA], ‘Revision of NSC 162/2’, 9 November 1954, FRUS, 1952–54, vol. II, p. 770. M. Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy, New Haven, p. 61. E. Nadelmann, Cops Across Borders: the Internationalisation of US Criminal Law Enforcement, p. 11–12. Alan R. Millett, ‘The Rise and Decline of the Cuban Rural Guard, 1898–1912’, The Americas XXIX, 1972, p. 200. An overview of these interventions can be found in W. Perkins, Constraint of Empire: The United States and Caribbean Interventions, Contributions in Comparative Colonial Studies, No. 8, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981. US Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual [reprint of 1940 edition], Washington: Department of the Navy, Headquarters United States Marine Corps, 1987, Chapter XII, p. 2. Ibid., p. 8. I. Beckett, ‘The United States Experience’, in Ian F.W. Beckett (ed.), The Roots of Counter-Insurgency: Armies and Guerrilla Warfare, 1900–1945, p. 114. Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy, Chapters 4 and 5, passim. Beckett, ‘The US Experience’, p. 113. M. Havron, W. Chenault, J. Dodson, A. Rambo, Constabulary Capabilities for LowLevel Conflict, p. 24. R. Keyser, ‘Constabularies for Central America’, Marine Corps Gazette, vol. XI, p. 87. M. Curti and K. Birr, Prelude to Point Four: American Technical Missions Overseas, 1838–1938, pp. 93, 215–16. R. Bruce, ‘Impact of the Occupation in Japan on American Notions About USInduced Reform in the Third World’, Indian Journal of American Studies 15, p. 124. Frank Kowalski, ‘Grace of Heaven’, unpublished manuscript, Frank Kowalski Papers, Box 18, Folder 6, ‘Speeches and Writings, Articles, Undated, Japan’, Manuscripts Division Collection, Library of Congress, Washington. P. Katzenstein and Y. Tsujinaka, Defending the Japanese State: Structures, Norms and the Political Responses to Terrorism and Violent Social Protest in the 1970s and 1980s, Cornell East Asia Series, p. 53. Ko-Wang Mei, ‘Oriental Police Systems and Counter-Subversive Measures’, unpublished paper, pp. 50–1. G. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, p. 390. Richard B. Finn, Winners in Peace: MacArthur, Yoshida and Postwar Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, pp. 165–6.

Notes 67 68 69 70

71

72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82

83

84

85

153

P. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan, p. 58. T. Lobe, ‘U.S. Police Assistance for the Third World’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 1975, p. 26. G. McGhee, On the Frontline in the Cold War: An Ambassador Reports, Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger Publishers, 1997, p. 77. Office of Public Safety [OPS], ‘History of the Office of Public Safety (1955–1969)’, p. 1, n.d., RG 286, Records of AID, OPS, Office of the Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, IPS 2-3 to 6-4, folder marked ‘IPS 6-1, Executive Office (History of OPS 1955–70)’, US National Archives at College Park, Maryland (hereafter cited as NACP); R. Cohen and C. Gatti, In the Eye of the Storm: The Life of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, pp. 46–8; and J. Balitis, ‘Paramilitary and Police Forces in Low Intensity Conflict: Iran Conflict Period 1945–1963’, unpublished paper, US Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 8 March 1971, pp. 7–9. Schwarzkopf was the father of the commander of allied forces during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. M. Huggins, ‘US Supported State Terror: A History of Police Training in Latin America’, Crime and Social Justice 27–8, p. 157; and J.C. Murray, ‘The Anti-bandit War’, in T.N. Greene (ed.), The Guerrilla – and How to Fight Him: Selections from the Marine Corps Gazette, pp. 76–7. Mutual Security Agency [MSA], Southeast Asia, Washington: MSA, 1952, p. 1. Draft press release, n.d., p. 1, White House Office, NSC Staff: Papers 1948–61, Operations Coordinating Board, Central File Series [cited hereafter as NSC Staff Papers] Box 17, folder marked ‘(File #3) (1) [Jan–Nov 1956]’, DDEL. Ibid., p. 1. OPS, ‘Internal Security Programs’, 20 March 1961, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, folder marked ‘IPS 1-1 to 2-3, General Reports and Statistics (Public Safety Summaries)’, NACP. Bruce, ‘Training Foreign Police at the International Police Academy’, p. 7. For an overview of this campaign, see L. Greenberg, The Hukbalahap Insurrection: A Case Study of a Successful Anti-Insurgency Operation in the Philippines, 1946–1955, Historical Analysis Series; and S. Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, pp. 341–54. M. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, p. 509. Huggins, Political Policing, p. 73. O. Marenin, ‘From IPA to ILEA: Change and Continuity in the United States’ International Police Training Programs’, unpublished paper, p. 3. See for example DOS, Smith to Lay, 23 July 1953, FRUS 1952–1954, vol. IV, The American Republics, p. 14. NSC, ‘Points for Discussion in Connection with the Board Assistants Consideration of a Covering Report upon the “Annual Status on Operations Pursuant to NSC Action 1290-d”’, 1 February 1957, p. 1, NSC Staff Papers, Box 18, folder marked ‘(File #4) (4) [Nov 56–Mar 57]’, DDEL. WH, ‘Record of Actions by the National Security Council at its Two Hundred and Twenty Ninth Meeting’, 21 December 1954, p. 2, Dwight David Eisenhower: Papers as President of the United States, 1954–61 (Ann Whitman File), NSC Series, Box 1, DDEL. See for example WH, ‘OCB Report Upon the NSC Action 1290-d Program Accompanying the ICA Report “Annual Status Report on Operations Pursuant to NSC Action 1290-d”’, 13 March 1957, pp. 3–4, RG 273, Records of the NSC, OMM, 300–19, OMM 319th Meeting, Box-62, NACP. WH, NSC 5707/8, ‘Basic National Security Policy’, 3 June 1957, FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. XIX, p. 517.

154 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

101

102 103 104 105 106

107

108

Notes ICA, Engle to Black, 13 August 1956, p. 3, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, folder marked ‘IPS 1, General Policy, Guidelines, Background’, NACP. Bruce, ‘Training Foreign Police’, p. 7. ICA, Roseman to Hollister, ‘Weekly Operations Report – Civil Police Administration Program’, 7 December 1955, p. 2, NSC Staff Papers, Box 17, folder marked ‘(File #2) (7) [Oct–Dec 1955]’, DDEL. ‘OCB Progress Report – March 19, 1957: Overseas Internal Security Program’, p. 1, RG 273, Records of the NSC, Official Meeting Minutes [OMM], 300–19, OMM 319th Meeting, Box-62, NACP. DOS, MacArthur to Hoover, 11 January 1955, p. 1, FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. X, pp. 2–3. WH, report of the NSC 1290-d Working Group, February 16, 1955, ibid., p. 9. Rempe, ‘American Trojan Horse?’ pp. 36–7. OCB, ‘Draft Report to the NSC’, p. 4 (see note 14). Ibid., p. 4. ICA, ‘Supplemental Progress Report on Actions Taken Pursuant to NSC Action 1290-d’, September 6, 1956, FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. X, p. 110. [ICA Director] Hollister to Director USOM, 26 June 1956, p. 4, NSC Staff Papers, Box 17, folder marked ‘(File #3) (3) [Jan–Nov 1956]’, DDEL. ICA, Smith to Arnold, 12 November 1958, p. 7, document no. 1080, accessed at HTTP: . ICA, director to OCB, ‘Progress Report on Actions taken pursuant to NSC Action 1290-d’, 22 June, 1956, p. 3, NSC Staff Papers, Box 17, folder marked ‘(File #3) (4) [Jan–Nov 1956]’, DDEL. Huggins, ‘US Supported State Terror’, p. 154; and E. Furniss, Jr., ‘American Wartime Objectives in Latin America’, World Politics 2, p. 381. Testimony of Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Henry F. Holland, 9 May 1956, US Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series), vol. VIII, 84th Cong., 2nd sess., 1956, Washington: USGPO, 1978 p. 241. Michigan State University Group [MSUG], Ryan to Barrows, 3 July 1957, p. 2, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 695, File 7, Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections, East Lansing, Michigan (cited hereafter as MSUAHC). Public Record Office [PRO], FO371/123511, DF1641/31, ‘Meeting at the Presidence du Conseil des Ministres in Phnom Penh on 31 July 1956’. PRO, FO371/123511, DF1641/29, Mackintosh to Etherington-Smith, 6 September 1956; and FO371/123512, DF1642/9, Wilford to Tomlinson, 18 December 1956. WH, ‘Report of the Interagency Committee on Police Assistance Programs in newly Emerging Countries’, July 24, 1962, p. 21, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File, 1956–74, folder marked ‘IPS 7-1, NSC (Memorandums)’, NACP. ‘Civil Police Administration Division: Brief Orientation’, n.d., p.1, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, folder marked ‘IPS 1-1 to 2-3, General Reports and Statistics (Public Safety Summaries)’, NACP. ICA, ‘ICA Annual Status Report on Operations Pursuant to NSC Action 1290-d to the OCB for the NSC for the Period December 1955 through November 1956, Working Draft’, 27 December 1956, summary, p. 1, NSC Staff Papers, Box 18, folder marked ‘(File #4) (1) [Nov 56–Mar 57]’, DDEL. ICA, ‘Annual Report of Operations of the Overseas Internal Security Program to the Operations Coordinating Board of the National Security Council, December 1956 through November 1957, Revised March 11, 1958’, p. 1, OSANSA, NSC Series, Subject Subseries, Box 6, folder marked ‘OSIP (April 1958–May 1959)’, DDEL. OPS, ‘Internal Security Programs’, p. 1. The relationship between the university and the CIA are discussed more fully in chapters 2 and 3.

Notes 109 110

111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123

124 125 126 127 128 129

130 131 132 133

155

WH, Coffey to Stanley, 19 February 1959, p. 1, OSANSA: Records, 1952–1961, OCB Series, Subject Subseries, box no. 5, folder marked ‘Overseas Internal Security’, DDEL. For discussions of the administration’s international propaganda policies, see Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961; and Kenneth A. Osgood, ‘Form before Substance: Eisenhower’s Commitment to Psychological Warfare and Negotiations with the Enemy’, Diplomatic History, vol. 24, no. 3. Eisenhower Public Papers: 1953, p. 14. See for example OCB, ‘Report to the NSC’, 6 October 1955, p. 4; and DOS, Smith to Lay, 23 July 1953, FRUS 1952–1954, vol. IV, p. 14. DOS, Report to the OCB, ‘Supplemental Progress Report on Actions Taken Pursuant to NSC Action 1290-d’, FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. X, p. 116. Ibid., pp. 116–17. G. Treverton, Covert Action: The Limits of Intervention in the Postwar World, p. 64. DOS, ‘Supplemental Progress Report’, p. 116 (see note 113). Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975, p. 63. E. Pauker, Soviet Steps Toward a Global Posture: Khrushchev’s 1959–1960 Policy toward the Third World, WN-7217-ISA, p. 29. Testimony of Allen Dulles, 7 February 1958, US Congress, Senate, Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series), vol. X, 85th Congress, 2nd session, 1958, Washington: USGPO, 1980, p. 93. WH, ‘Discussion at the 388th Meeting of the NSC, December 3, 1958’, 5 December 1958, pp. 7, 9, Ann Whitman File, Box 10, DDEL. R. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, p. 199. Quoted in C. Alexander, Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1952–1961, Bloomington, Indiana and London: Indiana University Press, 1975, p. 238. US Department of Defense [DOD], French to Bussey, 7 April 1959, p. 1, US President’s Commission to Study the United States Military Assistance Program (Draper Commission): Records, 1958–1959, Box 20, Overseas Internal Security Program, DDEL. Watson, Into the Missile Age, p. 658. Thorp, Reality of Foreign Aid, p. 50; and D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace: 1956–1961, p. 133. D. Eisenhower, ‘The Importance of Understanding’, Department of State Bulletin 40, 27 April 1959, pp. 579–80. See for example 269th NSC Meeting, 8 December 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. X, p. 50. Ibid., p. 1; and Huggins, Political Policing, p. 80. ICA, memorandum for the record, ‘World Wide Review of the Public Safety Programs (FY 59-60)’, 1 December 1958, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, folder marked ‘IPS 1-1 to 2-3, General Reports and Statistics (Public Safety Summaries)’, NACP. OCB, ‘Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group in Connection with the Overseas Internal Security Program (OISP)’, 25 March 1959, p. 4, document no. 2165, accessed at . Rempe, ‘American Trojan Horse?’, pp. 50–1. WH, ‘Discussion at the 449th Meeting of the NSC, Thursday, June 30, 1960’, pp. 9–10, Ann Whitman File, Box 12, DDEL. ICA, A. Haney, ‘Observations and Suggestions Concerning the “Overseas Internal Security Program” (OISP)’, 14 June 1957, p. 24, document no. 3332, DDRS, November–December 1997 (microfiche). Haney had a colorful past. After serving as CIA station chief in Seoul, Haney led PBSUCCESS, the CIA operation to destabilize the Arbenz government in Guatemala. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen

156

134

135 136

137 138

139 140 141 142 143

144 145 146 147 148 149 150

151 152 153 154

Notes Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, pp. 109–17. ICA, airgram (ICATO Circ. XA-354), ‘ICA Operations Under the Overseas Internal Security Program’, 6 November 1959, pp. 2–3, Working Files for Komer and Saunders [Komer Files], National Security Files [NSF] Open Boxes 413–14, folder marked ‘Counterinsurgency Police Programs, General, 1961–1963, (Folder 1 of 2)’, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts (hereafter cited as JFKL). OCB, ‘Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group’, pp. 16–17 (see note 130). ICA, Wilson, ‘Report on the Public Safety Training Program of ICA’, July 1958, p. 3, MSU VN Project, box 685, folder 19, MSUAHC. Wilson, a professor in the School of Criminology at the University of California at Berkeley, was the most influential American police administration expert of the 1950s and 1960s. See for example WH, NSC 5906/1, ‘Basic National Security Policy’, 5 August 1959, FRUS, 1958–1960, vol. III, National Security Policy, p. 303. This figure is astronomically higher than the 12,000-man training number ICA claimed during the previous year. The 1957 figure probably includes foreign paramilitary forces along with the police. Paramilitaries were often quite large. In the Philippines during the early 1950s, for example, the constabulary stood at 30,000 officers and men. A. Jones and A. Molnar, Internal Defense Against Insurgency: Six Cases, Washington: Center for Research in Social Systems, The American University, December 1966, p. 51. ‘ICA Annual Report (December 1956–November 1957)’, pp. 2–3 (see note 107). ICA, ‘World Wide Review’, p. 1 (see note 129). WH, ‘OCB Report Upon 1290-d’, 13 March 1957, p. 3, RG 273. DOS, ‘Report to the National Security Council: Status of Mutual Security Programs as of June 30, 1958’, p. 7, RG 273, Records of the NSC, OMM 388–9, OMM 388 (folder 2 of 2), NACP. ICA, ‘Public Safety Division Analysis of ICA Role in Overseas Internal Security Program (OISP) in 1957’, 6 December 1957, pp. 1–2, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, folder marked ‘IPS 1, General Policy, Guidelines, Background’, NACP. Ibid., Tab A, p. 5. ICA, Smith to Arnold, 12 November 1958, p. 5. D. Hendrickson, A Review of Security-Sector Reform, Working Paper No. 1, London: Centre for Defence Studies, September 1999, pp. 15–16. OCB, ‘Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group’, p. 12 (see note 130). The esprit de corps of the CIA during the agency’s ‘golden age’ is captured in E. Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA. Quoted in J. Marks, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control, p. 30. Bruce, ‘Training Foreign Police’, p. 45; and OPS, ‘History of the Office of Public Safety (1955–1969)’, p. 1, n.d., RG 286, OPS, Office of the Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, IPS 2-3 to 6-4, folder marked ‘IPS 6-1, Executive Office (History of OPS 1955–70)’, NACP. E. Lefever, ‘US Public Safety Assistance: An Assessment’, report prepared for the US Agency for International Development under contract with the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, December 1973, p. 18. NSC, Komer to Carl [Kaysen], 22 June 1962, p. 1, Komer Files, NSF Open Boxes 413–414, folder marked ‘Counterinsurgency Police Programs, White House Memoranda, 5/61–10/63’, JFKL. WH, NSC 5501, 7 January 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, vol. XIX, p. 28. WH, 319th NSC Meeting, April 11, 1957, ibid., p. 475.

Notes

157

2 The origins of police and paramilitary assistance to South Vietnam 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Quoted in J. Morgan, The Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam: 1955–1975, p. 20. Quoted in D. Anderson, ‘Dwight Eisenhower and Wholehearted Support of Ngo Dinh Diem’, in D. Anderson (ed.), Shadow on the White House: Presidents and the Vietnam War, 1945–1975, p. 54. See for example R. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960, particularly Chapter 16. The phrase is from R. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy. J. Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance: Michigan State University and the Vietnam War. See for example F. Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972, pp. 85–6; D. Duncanson, Government and Revolution in Vietnam, pp. 275–6; and R. McNamara, with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, pp. 32–3. P. Kattenburg, The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945–1975, p. 42. Yuen Foong Khong, ‘The United States and East Asia: Challenges to the Balance of Power’, in N. Woods (ed.), Explaining International Relations Since 1945, p. 188. For a discussion of the Eisenhower administration’s decision not to intervene militarily to support the French, see M. Billlings-Yun, Decisions against War: Eisenhower and Dien Bien Phu, 1954. For an overview of the complex events surrounding the conference, see L. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: From World War II to Dienbienphu, 1941–1954, Chapter, passim. For the text of the agreements and Final Declaration, see G. Kahin and J. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam, pp. 348–69. Anthony Short, The Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 177. G. Hess, ‘The American Search for Stability in Southeast Asia: The SEATO Structure of Containment’, in WI. Cohen and A. Iriye (eds), The Great Powers in Asia, 1953–1960, p. 272. Quoted in D. Greene, ‘John Foster Dulles and the End of the Franco-American Entente in Indochina’, Diplomatic History 16, 1992, p. 553. G. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975, pp. 55–6. R. McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia Since World War II, p. 70. N. Graebner, ‘The Scholar’s View of Vietnam, 1964–1992’, in D. Showalter and J Albert (eds), An American Dilemma: Vietnam, 1964–1973, p. 14. A. Short, The Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 193. United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967 [abbreviated hereafter as USVNR], Book 2, Washington: USGPO, 1971, p. 4. Anderson, ‘Dwight Eisenhower’, p. 52. White House [WH], letter from Eisenhower to Diem, n.d., Foreign Relations of the United States FRUS, 1952–1954, Vol. XIII, Part II: Indochina, p. 2167. Quoted in Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, p. 315. Greene, ‘John Foster Dulles’, p. 566. US Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos: Report by Senator Mike Mansfield, 84th Congress, 1st Session, Washington: USGPO, 1955, p. 2. R. Scigliano, ‘Political Parties in South Vietnam Under the Republic’, Pacific Affairs 33, p. 328. C. Thayer, War by Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Vietnam, 1954–60, p. 21. E. Hammer, The Struggle for Indochina, p. 284.

158 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Notes Lansdale to Collins and O’Daniel, 13 March 1955, p. 1, Box 28, folder marked ‘Lansdale, Edward G. (Colonel) (2)’, J. Lawton Collins Papers, DDEL. Department of State [DOS], Collins to Dulles, 20 January 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, Vietnam, p. 101. For example, see Lansdale to Collins, 11 March 1955, p. 2, Box 28, folder marked ‘Lansdale, Edward G. (Colonel) (2)’, Collins Papers, DDEL. R. Jumper, ‘Sects and Communism in South Vietnam’, Orbis III, pp. 88–90. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, p. 339. Spector, Advice and Support, p. 252. R. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975, p. 85. Morgan, The Vietnam Lobby, pp. 3–8. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, p. 350. Quoted in G. Hess, Vietnam and the United States: Origins and Legacy of War, p. 56. See for example National Security Council [NSC], Operations Coordinating Board [OCB] Working Group discussion, 15 October 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, p. 555. Schulzinger, A Time for War, p. 78. D. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961, p. 130. ‘The Bright Spot in Asia’, Saturday Evening Post, 15 September 1956, p. 4. Quoted in G. Herring, ‘A Good Stout Effort’: John Foster Dulles and the Indochina Crisis, 1954, 1955’, in R. Immerman (ed.), John Foster Dulles and the Diplomacy of the Cold War, p. 231. B. Fall, Viet-Nam Witness, 1953–1966, p. 236. NSC, OCB, ‘Analysis of Internal Security Situation in Free Vietnam and Recommended Action’, 14 December 1955, p. 1, Box 81 (‘OCB 091.4, Southeast Asia File’), folder marked ‘[December 1955–June 1956], #4. (6)’ NSC Staff Papers, OCB Central File Series, DDEL. The term ‘Viet Minh’ is a contraction of Vietnamese phrase Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or ‘League for the Independence of Viet Nam’. Thayer, War by Other Means, p. xxviii. G. Carver, ‘The Faceless Viet Cong’, Foreign Affairs, April 1966, p. 357. Central Intelligence Agency [CIA], National Intelligence Estimate 63-7-54, 23 November 1954, Part II: Indochina, Washington: USGPO, 1982, p. 2288. NSC, 218th meeting of the NSC, 22 October 1954, FRUS, 1952–1954, Vol. XIII, p. 2154. NSC, ‘Discussion at the 244th Meeting of the National Security Council, April 7, 1955’, 8 April 1955, p. 18, Box 6, Papers of DDE as President of the United States (Ann Whitman File), NSC Series, DDEL. DOS, MacArthur to Hoover, 11 January 1955, FRUS 1955–1957, Vol. X: Foreign Aid and Economic Defense Policy, p. 1. ‘The Advisory Build-Up, 1961–67’, USVNR, IV.B.3., Book 3, pp. 4–5. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam, p. 329. ‘US Training of the Vietnamese National Army, 1954–1959’, USVNR, IV.A.4, Book 2, pp. 10–12. Military Assistance Advisory Group [MAAG], O’Daniel to Department of the Army, 27 July 1954, FRUS, 1952–54, Vol. XIII, p. 1885. Finn, memorandum of conversation, 28 December 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, p. 605. Williams paper, 28 December 1955, ibid., p. 606. ‘Advisory Build-Up’, USVNR, p. 5. ‘Why US is Losing in Vietnam: An Inside Story’, US News & World Report, 9 November 1964, p. 62. OCB, ‘Analysis of Internal Security’, 14 December 1955, p. 4 (see Chapter 4, note 9).

Notes 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66

67 68 69

70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

159

BDM Corporation, A Study of Strategic Lessons Learned in Vietnam, Volume I: Conduct of the War, Book 1, Operational Analyses, McLean, Virginia: BDM, May 9, 1980, p. 1–19. A. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam, 1986, p. 5. Spector, Advice and Support, p. 273. MAAG, Williams paper, 28 December 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, p. 606. For an account of Lansdale’s activities in South East Asia, see C. Curry, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988, Chapters 5–8. E. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia, p. 338. DOS, Rheinhardt to State, 25 August 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, p. 527. International Cooperation Administration [ICA], Roseman to Hollister, 22 September 1955, p.1, Record Group [RG] 286, Agency for International Development [AID], Office of Public Safety [OPS], Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1955–1957, folder marked ‘IPS#1 Vietnam Program (History)’, NACP. Michigan State College, Brandstatter, et al., ‘Report of the Special FOA Mission from Michigan State College for Public Administration, Public Information, Police Administration and Public Finance and Economics’, Saigon, 16 October 1954, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #2-3/Program Surveys, folder marked ‘MSU Report ’54’, NACP. Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance, p. 11. ‘University Aides Explain C.I.A. Tie’, New York Times, 15 April 1966, p. 11. ICA, Hall to Fitzgerald, 17 September 1958 p. 3, RG 472, Records of the US Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support [MACV/CORDS], Public Safety Directorate, General Records, folder marked ‘Civil Guard’, NACP. R. Scigliano and G. Fox, Technical Assistance in Vietnam: The Michigan State University Experience, Praeger Special Studies in International Economics and Development, p. 4. M. Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America, p. 87; and MSUG, Hoyt to Hall, 7 December 1957, p. 2, RG286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, folder marked ‘IPS #1/Background/Vietnam/Folder II/1956–58’, NACP. Dr R. Smuckler, interview by author, 17 June 1999, Washington, DC. K. Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era, pp. 21–3. Michigan State University [MSU], Hannah to Collins, 31 December 1954, p. 1, administrative files, international programs, Vietnam Project, 1954, John A. Hannah Papers, MSUAHC. Heineman, Campus Wars, p. 23. M. Taylor and A. Jaffe, ‘The Professor-Diplomat: Ann Arbor and Cambridge Were Never Like This’, The New Republic, 5 March 1962, p. 28. D. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965, p. 205. Anderson, Trapped by Success, p. 140. R.B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War, Volume I: Revolution Versus Containment, 1955–1961, p. 50. ICA, Starr to Chief, Civil Police Administration Division, 18 October 1956, p. 2, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, folder marked ‘IPS #1/Background/VN/Folder II/1956–58’, NACP. For discussion of French colonial theory, see I. Wallerstein, The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century, pp. 172–173. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, pp. 98–99.

160 83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94

95 96 97 98

99 100

101 102 103 104

Notes Ibid., p. 99; and MSUG, Ryan to Howard, ‘Brief History of the Sûreté in IndoChina’, 10 January 1956, p. 3, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS#1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background (1957–1960), folder marked ‘IPS #1/Background/Vietnam/Folder II/1956–58’, NACP. J. Munholland, ‘The French Response to the Vietnamese Nationalist Movement, 1905–14’, Journal of Modern History 47, p. 671. Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1945, Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1982, pp. 244–5. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, p. 101. D. Duncanson, ‘The Police Function and its Problems’, in D. Duncanson, R. Yudkin, and B. Zorthian, Lessons of Vietnam: Three Interpretative Essays, pp. 21–2. J.L. Collins, Lightning Joe: An Autobiography, p. 383. M. Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950, p. 179. H. Smith, et al., Area Handbook for Vietnam, Department of the Army Pamphlet 550–5, Washington: USGPO, April 1967, p. 411; and MSUG, Ryan to Hoyt, ‘Brief History of the Sûreté in Indo-China’, 10 January 1956, p.1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS#1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background (1957–1960), folder marked ‘IPS #1/Background/Vietnam/Folder II/1956–58’, NACP. W. Nighswonger, Rural Pacification in Vietnam, Praeger Special Studies in International Politics and Public Affairs, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1966, pp. 10–11. United States Operations Mission, Vietnam [USOM], ‘Activity Report, June 30, 1954 through June 30 1956’, Wesley R. Fishel Papers, MSUAHC. ICA, Starr to Chief, 18 October 1956, p. 4 (see Chapter 4 note 7). Foreign Operations Administration [FOA], Starr, memorandum for file, ‘Nature of Village Police in Vietnam’, 14 February 1955, RG 469, Records of the US Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–61, Mission to Vietnam/Public Administration Division/Subject Files/1954–56/1954/Organization Manual-Public Administration: Philippines, folder marked ‘Police Organization’, NACP. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, pp. 99–100. R. Komer, The Malayan Emergency in Retrospect: Organization of a Successful Counterinsurgency Effort, R-957-ARPA, pp. 110–11. DOS, despatch No. 358 from Saigon to State, 28 April 1955, Encl. 1, pp. 7–8, Box 28, folder marked ‘Misc. Top Secret Files (1)’, Collins Papers, DDEL. MSUG, ‘Report on the Police of Viet Nam’, December 1, 1955, pp. i–ii, 50, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, folder marked ‘IPS #1/Report on the Police of Vietnam/Far East/’55’, NACP. The Vietnamese names are taken from MSUG, ‘Training Plan for assisting the Government of Vietnam in the Training of their Civil Police Forces’, November 1957 (revised May 1959), p. 3, MSUAHC. ICA, Starr to Chief, 18 October 1956, p. 4 (see Chapter. 4, note 7). MSUG, ‘Report on the Proposed Organization of the Law Enforcement Agencies of the Republic of Viet-Nam’, April 1956, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #2-3/Program Surveys, 1954–1960, folder marked ‘11-1 Surveys 12/55 and Earlier (1)’, NACP. DOS, Rheinhardt to State, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, p. 528. MSU, Weidner to Barrows, 11 October 1955, p. 3, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1955–1957, folder marked ‘IPS#1 Vietnam Program (History)’, NACP. Ibid., p. 4. MSU, ‘Preorganization’, p. 3, n.d., Vietnam Project, MSUAHC.

Notes 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

122 123 124

125 126 127

128 129 130 131 132 133

161

ICA, Stodter, ‘Study of Civil Police Project Vietnam’, 15 November 1956, p. 3, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, IPS 1, General Policy, Guidelines, Background, folder marked ‘IPS#1 Vietnam Program (History), 1955’, NACP. J. Montgomery, The Politics of Foreign Aid: American Experience in Southeast Asia, p. 65. Smith, et al., Area Handbook, p. 418. MSUG, Ryan to Hoyt, 5 December 1956, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 683, Folder 89, MSUAHC. OCB, ‘Analysis of Internal Security Situation’, 14 December 1955, p. 9. Scigliano, South Vietnam, p. 111. MAAG, Williams, memorandum for record, 28 December 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, p. 610. Thayer, War by Other Means, pp. 56–7. Williams for the record, 28 December 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, p. 610. Quang Truong Ngo, Territorial Forces, Indochina Monographs, Washington: US Army Center of Military History, 1981, p. 30. DOS, Reinhardt to State, 17 November 1955, in FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, p. 581. See for example W. Duiker, U.S. Containment Policy and the Conflict in Indochina, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 233. B. Fall, ‘Indochina Since Geneva’, Pacific Affairs 28, 1955, p. 6. R. Shaplen, The Lost Revolution: The United States in Vietnam, 1946–1966, rev. edn., New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966, p. 137. Republic of Vietnam, Seven Years of the Ngo Dinh Diem Administration, 1954–1961, Saigon: Information Printing Office, 26 October 1961, p. 198. ICA, Starr to Chief, 18 October 1956, p. 4 (see Chapter 4, note 7). OCB, ‘Progress Report on “US Objectives and Courses of Action with Respect to Southeast Asia” (NSC 5405) and Portions of NSC 5429/5’, 11 July 1956, p. 3, Box 19, folder marked ‘US Security Effort Overseas [1957] (1)’, WHO, OSANSA: NSC Series, Subject Subseries, DDEL. DOS, Reinhardt to State, 5 December 1955, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, p. 597. Scigliano, South Vietnam p. 163. ICA, Bunting to Hollister, 16 December 1955, p. 1, RG 469, Office of the Directors, Geographic File of the Director, 1948–58/1955–58, Tunisia-Yugoslavia, folder marked ‘Vietnam’, NACP; and ICA, ‘International Cooperation Administration Annual Status Report on Operations Pursuant to NSC Action 1290-d to the Operations Coordinating Board for the National Security Council for the Period December 1955 through November 1956’, 15 January 1957, p. 10, Box 18, folder marked ‘#4 (1) [November 1956–March 1957]’, NSC Staff Papers, OCB Central File Series, DDEL. R. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1995, p. 36. MSUG, Smuckler, ‘Report on the MSU-Vietnam Project’, April 1966, pp. 7–8, MSU, Vietnam Project, Box 919, folder 3, MSUAHC. B. Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45, particularly pp. 305–6, 491–6. For a discussion of the difficult post-war relationship between the United States and Chiang, see D. Macdonald, Adventures in Chaos: American Intervention for Reform in the Third World, Cambridge, Chapters 4 and 5. Short, Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 214. MSUG, Smuckler, memorandum for record, 16 November 1959, p. 2, Hannah Papers, MSUAHC. Smith, International History, Volume I, p. 50. J. Quinlivan, ‘Coup-proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East’, International Security 24, 1999, pp. 148–9. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, p. 255. ICA, Stodter, ‘Study of Civil Police’, 15 November 1956, p. 6, RG 286.

162

Notes

134 135

W. Colby and P. Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA, p. 145. MSUG, ‘The Vietnam Project in Brief’, 17 February 1956, p. 1, Box 42, folder 51, Hannah Papers, MSUAHC. Quoted in Herring, America’s Longest War, p. 60. USOM, USOM to Dulles, 5 October 1956, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1955–1957, folder marked ‘IPS#1 Vietnam Program (History)’, NACP. MSUG, Fishel, ‘Special Report on Michigan State University Group’, 14 September 1956, p. 1, Box 42, folder 51, Hannah Papers, MSUAHC. MSUG, ‘Final Report Covering Activities of the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group for the Period May 20, 1955–June 30, 1962’, pp. 48–50, Vietnam Project, MSUAHC. Anderson, Trapped by Success, p. 147. OCB, ‘Progress Report’, 11 July 1956, p. 6, DDEL. M. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990, p. 61. ICA, Engle to Esman, 28 November 1956, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1955–1957, folder marked ‘IPS#1 Vietnam Program (History)’, NACP. MSUG, personnel roster, n.d. [1955?], Vietnam Project, Box 695, folder 18, MSUAHC. Scigliano and Fox, Technical Assistance, p. 8. Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance, p. 41. ICA, ‘ICA Annual Status Report on Operations Pursuant to NSC Action 1290-d to the OCB for the NSC for the Period December 1955 through November 1956, Working Draft’, 27 December 1956, p. 59, NSC Staff Papers, OCB Central File Series, Box 18, folder marked ‘(File #4) (1) [Nov 56–Mar 57]’, DDEL. ICA, Naughten to Roseman, 6 January 1956, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject Files, IPS 7-1 to 7-2, folder marked ‘Vietnam-MSU ‘56’, NACP. See for example Arthur M. Thurston, ‘Survey of Training Activities of the A.I.D. Police Assistance Program’, AID, Office of Public Safety, November 1962, pp. 33–4, folder marked ‘Counterinsurgency Police Programs, General, 1961–1963 (Folder 2 of 2)’, Robert Komer Working Files, JFKL. ICA, ‘Report to the NSC on 1290-d Programs, December 1, 1955–November 30, 1956’ [draft], 14 December 1956, p. 10, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, IPS 1, folder marked ‘IPS#1 General Policy Guidelines. Background’, NACP. The CIA role in counter-subversive training is discussed further in Chapter 3. ‘Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Recommendations Relative to a Mutual Security Program’, 20 April 1955, reprinted in US Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series), Vol. VII, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 1955, Washington: USGPO, 1978, Appendix E, p. 3. McNamara, In Retrospect, p. 32.

136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147

148 149

150

151 152

153

3 The US and Diem’s internal security forces 1 2

3

Quoted in W. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, p. 174. For an account of the Eisenhower administration’s response to the ‘non-aligned’ movement, see H.W. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947–1960, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 223–327. Operations Coordinating Board [OCB], ‘Outline Plan of Operations with Respect to Vietnam’, April 12, 1957, p. 1, Box 40, folder marked ‘#6 (6)’, White House Office [WHO], National Security Council [NSC] Staff: Papers, 1948–61 [cited hereafter as NSC Staff Papers], OCB Central File Series, DDEL.

Notes 4 5

6

7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

163

Duiker, The Communist Road to Power, p. 195. Although the terms have different connotations, ‘Viet Cong’, ‘National Liberation Front’, ‘Vietnamese communists’, and related terms will, for stylistic reasons, be used interchangeably in this book. For a discussion of the semantics surrounding these terms, see C. Thayer, War by Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Viet-Nam, 1954–60, pp. xxviii–xxix. R. Scigliano, South Vietnam, pp. 33–4. Under Diem, South Vietnam was divided into thirty-eight provinces, each headed by a chief. Beneath each province were two to twelve districts, which were in turn divided among thousands of villages. Hamlets formed the lowest administrative unit. J. Zasloff, A Study of Administration in Binh Minh District, p. 16. G. Kahin and J. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam, p. 100. International Cooperation Administration [ICA], Office of the Assistant to the Director for Evaluation, ‘Evaluation of Viet-Nam Program’, 15 August 1957, p. 49, Record Group [RG] 286, Agency for International Development [AID], Office of Public Safety [OPS], Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1955–1957, folder marked ‘IPS #1/Handbook/Evaluation of Vietnam Program, August “57”’, NACP. Thayer, War by Other Means, p. 83. R. Schulzinger, A Time for War p. 91. Zasloff, A Study of Administration, p. 16. US Department of State [DOS], Saigon to DOS, despatch no. 409, 25 June 1957, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1955–1957, folder marked ‘IPS#1 Vietnam Program (History) “57”’, NACP. Saigon to DOS, despatch no. 137, 22 October 1957, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1955–1957, folder marked ‘IPS#1 Vietnam Program (History) ‘57’, NACP. MAAG, Williams to Dubrow, 9 October 1957, DOS, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, Vietnam, p. 846. Saigon to DOS, despatch no. 71, August 20, 1957, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1955–1957, folder marked ‘IPS#1 Vietnam Program (History) ‘57’, NACP. W. Duiker, ‘Waging Revolutionary War: The Evolution of Hanoi’s Strategy in the South, 1959–1965’, in J. Werner and Luu Doan Huynh (eds), The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives, Armonk, New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1993, p. 26. W. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam, New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1995, p. 111. Thayer, War by Other Means, p. 105. DOS, Intelligence Brief, no. 2070, 13 February 1957, p. 2., RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines, and Background, 1955, folder marked ‘IPS#1 Vietnam Program (History) “57”’, NACP. Quoted in W. Fishel (ed.), Vietnam: Anatomy of a Conflict, Itasca, Illinois: F.E. Peacock Publishers, Inc., 1968, p. 229. Quoted in Thayer, War by Other Means, p. 152. R. Scigliano and G. Fox, Technical Assistance, p. 5. ‘Vietnam Comes of Age’, MSU Reporter, November 1957, p. 8, MSUAHC. Professor R. Smuckler, interview by author, 17 June 1999, Washington, D.C. R. Smuckler, ‘Ngo Dinh Diem and the MSU Group’, International Educator VII, 1998, p. 13. Michigan State University Group [MSUG], Hoyt newsletter, 14 July 1956, pp. 2, 5, Vietnam Project, Box 695, File 5, MSUAHC.

164 27 28 29

30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Notes MSUG, ‘Final Report Covering Activities of the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group for the Period May 20, 1955–June 30, 1962’, June 1962, p. 3, MSUAHC. ICA, S. Andrews, ‘Case Report Nine: Michigan State University – South Vietnam Contract’, n.d. [1956?] p. 111, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #2-3/Program Surveys, 1954–1960, folder marked ‘Vietnam-MSU “56”’, NACP. MSUG, Ryan to Fishel, 6 August 1957, p. 1, MSU Vietnam Project, Box 695, File 6, MSUAHC. The total amount of US support for Vietnam’s police and paramilitary forces during the Diem period is difficult to establish. The records of the Office of Public Safety, the MSUG, the NSC, the OCB and other organizations offer conflicting figures. In addition, it is often unclear from the documents whether CIA or military funds are included in the discussion of any given year’s internal security assistance program. Scigliano and Fox, Technical Assistance, p. 15. ICA, ‘Annual Report of Operations of the Overseas Internal Security Program to the Operations Coordinating Board for the National Security Council, December 1956 through November 1957’, 4 March 1958, p. 33, RG 52, General Records of DOS, National Security Action Memoranda Files, 1961–1968, NSAM 118 to NSAM 136–56, folder marked ‘Overseas Internal Security Program’, NACP. MSUG, Smuckler, ‘Report on the MSU-Vietnam Project’, April 1966, p. 5, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 919, folder 3, MSUAHC. MSUG, Ryan to Fishel, 6 August 1957, p. 2. MSUG, Hoyt to Nguyen Huu Chau, 29 October 1957, MSU Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 695, folder 13, MSUAHC. H. Smith, et al., Area Handbook for Vietnam, Department of the Army Pamphlet 550–5, Washington: USGPO, April 1967, p. 411; and MSUG, Ryan to Howard, ‘Brief History of the Sûreté in Indo-China’, 10 January 1956, p. 6, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS#1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background (1957–1960), folder marked ‘IPS #1/Background/Vietnam/Folder II/1956–58’, NACP. MSUG, Hoyt to Nguyen Ngoc Le, 15 June 1956 [I], p. 1, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 690, Folder 45, MSUAHC. MSUG, ‘Michigan State University Contribution to the Vietnamese Sûreté’, 1957, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 684, folder 36, MSUAHC. MSUG, Ryan to Hoyt, 5 December 1956, p. 2, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 683, folder 89, MSUAHC. Ryan to Hoyt, 17 April 1956, p. 5. For a contemporary discussion of US law enforcement’s deep aversion to ‘political interference’, see W. Wechsler, ‘Law in Order: Restructuring US National Security’, National Interest, Spring 2002, p. 19. MSUG, Hoyt, ‘Training Plan for Assisting the Government of Vietnam in the Training of their Civil Police Forces’, May 1959, p. 12, MSUAHC. MSUG, Hoyt to Nguyen, 15 June 1956 [II], p. 3, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 690, Folder 45, MSUAHC. MSUG, ‘Summary of MSU Police Administration Program’, 16 May 1960, p. 23, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 695, Folder 30, MSUAHC. MSUG, Ryan to Fishel, 20 June 1957, p. 1, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 690, folder 44, MSUAHC. MSUG, ‘MSU Contribution to the Sûreté’, 1957, p. 10 (see note 37). See for example Nghiem Dang, Viet-Nam: Politics and Public Administration (Honolulu: East–West Center Press, 1966), pp. 124–5. MSUG, ‘MSU Contribution to the Sûreté’, 1957, p. 9 (see note 37). MSUG, Ryan, ‘Brief History of the Sûreté’, 10 January 1956, pp. 1–7 (see note 35). MSU, ‘Vietnam Comes of Age’, p. 9.

Notes 49 50

51 52 53 54

55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72

165

See for example MSUG, ‘Preliminary Report on the Establishment of a Central Record Bureau Service’, August 1957, p. 2, MSUAHC. MSUG, Ryan to Hoyt, 17 April 1956, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS#1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background (1957–1960), folder marked ‘IPS #1/Background/Vietnam/Folder II/1956–58’, NACP. Ibid., p. 9. MSUG, Chamberlain to Ryan, 14 October 1957, p. 2, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, box 690, folder 52, MSUAHC. W. McDougall, ‘Commentary: The Cold War Excursion of Science’, Diplomatic History 24, p. 125. A. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam, p. 25. The population figure is for 1956, taken from ICA, ‘Evaluation Report: Viet-Nam’, n.d., n.p, document no. 1983-66, online, available HTTP: < http://www.ddrs.psmedia.com> (accessed 22 October 2001). This is the on-line service of the Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS), Research Publications International, Woodbridge, Connecticut and Reading. The document number refers to the microform edition of the DDRS. MSUG, Fishel, et al., ‘Civil Police Administration Program’, 1 May 1957, p. 18, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS#1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background (1957–1960), folder marked ‘IPS #1/Background/Vietnam/Folder II/1956–58’, NACP. See for example MSUG, Hoyt to Nguyen Ngoc Le, 15 June 1956 [II], p. 1; and MSUG, ‘Summary of Police Program’, 16 May 1960, p. 5 (see note 42). Scigliano, South Vietnam, p. 206. OPS, ‘Internal Security Programs’, 20 March 1961, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, ‘IPS 1-1 to 2-3, General Reports and Statistics (Public Safety Summaries)’, NACP. Smuckler, ‘Ngo Dinh Diem and the MSU Group’, p. 15. D. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961, p. 144. Anderson estimates that five to eight CIA officers served as advisors to the VBI under MSUG cover. Scigliano and Fox, Technical Assistance, p. 21. The authors served as MSUG advisors in Vietnam. Anderson, Trapped by Success, p. 145. Smuckler, ‘Diem and the MSU Group’, p. 16; and MSUG, Smuckler, ‘Report on the MSU-Vietnam Project’, April 1966, p. 4, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 919, folder 3, MSUAHC. Michigan State University [MSU], ‘Memorandum of Agreement Concerning Police Technical Assistance Work’, Box 42, Folder 51, Hannah Papers, MSUAHC. Interview with Smuckler, June 17, 1999. Anderson, Trapped by Success, p. 145. Smuckler interview, June 17, 1999. Scigliano and Fox, Technical Assistance, pp. 11, 21. W. Hinckle, R. Scheer and S. Stern, ‘The University on the Make, or How MSU Helped Arm Madame Nhu’, Ramparts, April 1966, reprinted in a special edition of Ramparts, ‘A Muckraker’s Guide to 1968 and other Horrors’, n.d. [1968?], pp. 52–60. The controversy surrounding Michigan State’s Vietnam program is described in J. Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance: Michigan State University and the Vietnam War, pp. 123–39. See chapter 5 for a longer discussion of the relationship between American social scientists and the state during the 1950s and 1960s. For example, see I. Horowitz, ‘Michigan State and the CIA: A Dilemma for Social Science’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1966, pp. 26–9.

166 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Notes ICA, ‘Evaluation of Viet-Nam’, 15 August 1957, p. 48, RG286. Dubrow to DOS, August 3, 1957, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, pp. 837–8. MSUG, ‘Visit to Vietnam by Lt. Gen. John W. O’Daniel, United States Army (Ret.), May 19 to June 17, 1958’, p. 13, Wesley Fishel Papers, Box 1209, folder 59, MSUAHC. MAAG, Williams to CINCPAC, October 8, 1957, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, n. 6, pp. 859–60. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, p. 274. DOS, Dubrow to DOS, telegram no. 902, October 28, 1957, p. 2, RG 286, AID, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1955–1957, folder marked ‘IPS#1 Vietnam Program (History) “57”’, NACP. MSUG, Ryan to Engle, 18 June 1957, p. 1, RG 286, AID, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS#1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, folder marked ‘IPS#1, Vietnam Program (History), January–December “56”’, NACP. MSUG, Ryan to Fishel, 5 August 1957, p. 2, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 690, Folder 44, MSUAHC. A. Short, The Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 212. OCB, ‘Outline Plan of Operations’, 12 April 1957, p. 1, DDEL. D. Anderson, ‘Dwight Eisenhower and Wholehearted Support of Ngo Dinh Diem’, in D. Anderson (ed.), Shadow on the White House: Presidents and the Vietnam War, 1945–1975, p. 54. MSUG, ‘Review of Self-Defense Corps’, 31 October 1957, pp. 3, 10, MSUAHC.

4 The US, Diem and the Civil Guard 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

Quoted in B. Fall, Viet-Nam Witness: 1953–66, 1966, p. 181. See for example R. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1941–1960, pp. 320–5. S. Karnow, Vietnam: A History, 2nd ed., p. 236. US International Cooperation Agency [ICA], S. Andrews, ‘Case Report Nine: Michigan State University – South Vietnam Contract’, n.d., p. 112, Record Group [RG] 286, US Agency for International Development [AID], Office of Public Safety [OPS], Vietnam Division, Subject File, ‘IPS #2-3/Program Surveys’, in folder marked ‘Vietnam–MSU Report ‘54’, NACP. See for example R. Smuckler, ‘Ngo Dinh Diem and the MSU Group’, International Educator VII, 1998, pp. 13–19. The beginning of US assistance to South Vietnam’s internal security forces is discussed in Chapter 2. ICA, Starr to Chief, Civil Police Administration Division, 18 October 1956, p. 2., RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, folder marked ‘IPS #1/Background/VN/Folder II/1956–58’, NACP. Department of State [DOS], staff paper on police structure for Vietnam, Annex C, n.d. [1955], folder marked ‘Police (Unofficial Staff Paper about May 1955)’, Box 28, J. Lawton Collins Papers, DDEL. See for example Operations Coordinating Board [OCB], ‘Analysis of Internal Security Situation in Free Vietnam and Recommended Action’, 14 December 1955, p. 11, folder marked ‘[December 1955–June 1956], #4. (6)’, Box 81, OCB Central File Series, White House Office [WHO], National Security Council [NSC] Staff: Papers, 1948–1961, DDEL. J.L. Collins, Jr., The Development and Training of the South Vietnamese Army, 1950–1972, p. 10. MSUG, ‘FY 56 MDA Training Program for Internal Security Forces of Viet Nam’, n.d., p. 1, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 685, Folder 28, MSUAHC. R. Scigliano, South Vietnam, p. 111.

Notes 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

167

MSUG, Ryan to Hoyt, 5 December 1956, p. 2, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 683, Folder 89, MSUAHC. US Operations Mission to Vietnam [USOM], ‘Activity Report: June 30 1954 through June 30 1956’, p. 33, Wesley Fishel Papers, Box 1236, folder 4, MSUAHC. International Cooperation Administration [ICA], Starr to deputy director, 30 June 1955, p. 1, RG 469, Records of the US Foreign Assistance Agencies, 1948–1961, Mission to Vietnam, Public Administration Division, Subject Files, 1954–56, Organizational Manual-Public Administration: Philippines, file marked ‘police organization’, NACP. MSUG, ‘Report on the Police of Viet Nam’, 1 December 1955, p. 6, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, marked ‘IPS #1/Report on the Police of Vietnam/Far East/’55’, NACP. MSUG, ‘Civil Police Administration Program’, 1 May 1957, p. 3, MSUAHC. MSUG, ‘Resume of MSU-USOM Relationships’, n.d., p. 3, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 695, Folder 2, MSUAHC. ICA, Andrews, ‘Case Report Nine’, p. 112. R. Scigliano and G. Fox, Technical Assistance, pp. 15–18. J. Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance, p. 78. See for example MSUG, Sloane, ‘General Police Problems: Lecture Given at the Civil Guard High Officers School’, June 1957, p. 3, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 685, Folder 35, MSUAHC. United States Operations Mission [USOM], Walton to Gardiner, 28 December 1959, p. 1, RG 472, Records of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam [MACV]. Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support [CORDS], Public Safety Directorate, General Records, marked ‘Civil Guard’ (cited hereafter as MACV/CORDS Civil Guard Records), NACP. Ibid., p. 10. E. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars: An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia, p. 353. J.J. Zasloff, Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam, 1954–1960: The Role of the Southern Vietminh Cadres, RM-5163-ISA/ARPA, p. 27. Scigliano, Nation Under Stress, p. 164. See Chapter 7 below for a discussion of how American assistance to the Vietnamese military contributed to the Civil Guard’s lowly status. B. Schwarz, American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and El Salvador: The Frustrations of Reform and the Illusions of Nation Building, R-4042-USDP, p. 39. W. Odom, On Internal War: American and Soviet Approaches to Third World Clients and Insurgents, p. 63. D. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961, 1991, p. 147. E.H. Adkins, Jr., Administration of Justice and Security: An Educational Program, Saigon: MSUG, November 1961, p. 13, MSUAHC. J.B. Bell, Dragonwars: Armed Struggle and the Conventions of Modern War, pp. 290–1. See for example D. Blaufarb and G. Tanham, Who Will Win? A Key to the Puzzle of Revolutionary War, p. 83. MSUG, ‘Training Plan’, p. 12. DOS, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, intelligence report no. 8008, 5 May 1959, p. 10, document no. 1977-77C, online, available HHTP: (accessed 21 June 2001). This is the on-line service of the Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS), Research Publications International, Woodbridge, Connecticut and Reading. The document number refers to the microform edition of the DDRS. DOS, memorandum of Eisenhower–Diem conversation, 9 May 1957, DOS, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, Vietnam, pp. 798–9.

168 37 38 39 40 41 42

43

44 45 46 47

48 49

50 51 52

53 54

55 56 57 58 59

Notes Department of Defense [DOD], USVNR, 1945–1967, Washington: US GPO, 1971, Book 3, IV.B.3, p. 4. Collins, Development and Training, p. 6. MSUG, untitled paper on the Civil Guard, 5 February 1959, p. 3, Box 683, Folder 86, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, MSUAHC. DOS, memorandum of conversation, 9 May 1957, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, p. 800. Spector, Advice and Support, p. 322. USOM, Walton, ‘Saigon Assignment: Report no. V’, 1 December 1960, p. 16, appended to Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS], Hines to Chief of Staff, 16 December 1960, RG 218, JCS Records, Central Decimal File, 1960, 9155.3/4060 Vietnam (1 November 1960) to 9156/9105 Indonesia (19 December 1960), marked ‘9155.3/9105 Vietnam (29 December 1960)’, NACP. W. Duiker, ‘Waging Revolutionary War: The Evolution of Hanoi’s Strategy in the South, 1959-1965’, in J. Werner and Luu Doan Huynh (eds), The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American Perspectives, Armonk, New York and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1993, p. 29. A. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam, pp. 22–4. USVNR, book 2, IV.A.5, p. 26. OCB, ‘Analysis of Internal Security Situation’, 14 December 1955, p. 4. ICA, Hall to Arnold, 18 August 1958, attachment, p. 1, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 685, Folder 19, MSUAHC; and OCB, ‘Report in Connection with the Overseas Internal Security Program’, 1 April 1959, p. 5, RG 273, Records of the NSC, OMM [official meeting minutes] 390–426, folder marked ‘OMM 405th Meeting Box-78’, NACP. OPS, ‘History of the Office of Public Safety (1955–1969)’, p. 1, n.d., RG 286, OPS, Office of the Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, IPS 2-3 to 6-4, folder marked ‘IPS 6-1, Executive Office (History of OPS 1955–70)’, NACP. See for example ICA, Kennelly, memorandum for the record, ‘World Wide Review of the Public Safety Programs (FY 59–60)’, 1 December 1958, p. 2, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, folder marked ‘IPS 1-1 to 2-3, General Reports and Statistics (Public Safety Summaries)’, NACP. Scigliano, Nation Under Stress, p. 203. Anderson, Trapped by Success, pp. 152–3. For more on Washington’s difficult relationship with these leaders during the 1950s, see J.L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, p. 173, 300; and H.W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War, pp. 54–5. For an examination of the broader problem of reforming recalcitrant ‘client states’ during the early and middle Cold War, see D. Macdonald, Adventures in Chaos: American Intervention for Reform in the Third World. USVNR, book 2, IV.A.4., p. 22. DOS, Durbrow to DOS, Washington, despatch no. 215, 17 December 1957, attachment, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1955–1957, folder marked ‘Vietnam Program (History) 1955’, NACP. J. Montgomery, The Politics of Foreign Aid: American Experience in Southeast Asia, p. 68. Spector, Advice and Support, p. 324. USVNR, Book 2, IV.A.4., p. 22. WH, ‘Staff Notes No. 493’, 30 January 1959, p. 1, document no. 1982-200, online, available HHTP: (accessed 22 September 2000). MAAG, Williams, memorandum for the record, 13 November 1957, p. 3, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 683, Folder 89, MSUAHC.

Notes 60

61

62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77

78

79 80 81

169

MAAG, ‘Staff Study, the Civil Guard of the Future’, 28 February 1958, p. 6, RG 472, Records of the US Forces in Southeast Asia, MAAG, Vietnam, Adjutant General Division, Security Classified General Records 322 through 333, 1958, folder marked ‘MAAGV 322 Organization of the Civil Guard in the Future 1958’, NACP. ICA, ‘Annual Report of Operations of the Overseas Internal Security Program to the Operations Coordinating Board for the National Security Council, December 1956 through November 1957 (revised March 11, 1958)’, p. 33, marked ‘Overseas Internal Security Program (April 1958–May 1959)’, Box 6, NSC Series, Subject Subseries, WHO, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (OSANSA): Records, 1952–1961, DDEL. MAAG, memorandum of Diem–Williams conversation, 18 October 1957, FRUS, 1955–1957, Vol. I, p. 852. Spector, Advice and Support, p. 322. S. Williams, interview by T. Gittinger, 16 March 1981, interview I, transcript, Lyndon Banes Johnson Library, Austin, Texas (cited hereafter as LBJL). S. Williams, interview by T. Gittinger, 16 March 1981, interview II, transcript, LBJL. DOS, Durbrow to DOS, 18 June 1958, FRUS, 1958–1960, Vol. I, Vietnam, Washington: USGPO, 1986, pp. 60–1. ICA, Moyer to Smith, n.d. [1958?], p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1957–1960, folder marked ‘IPS#1/Background information/Vietnam 1958, 59’, NACP; and DOS, Dulles to Vietnam Embassy, 19 January 1959, FRUS, 1958–1960, Vol. I, pp. 134–5. DOD, Robbins to Bunting, ibid., pp. 37–8. MAAG, Williams to Lansdale, May 9, 1960, ibid., p. 443. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, p. 353. Williams to Lansdale, May 9, 1960, FRUS, 1958–1960, Vol. I, p. 443. Edward G. Lansdale, interview by Ted Gittinger, September 15, 1981, interview II, transcript, LBJL. Scigliano, Nation Under Stress, p. 114. ICA, ‘Annual Status Report on Operations Pursuant to NSC Action 1290-d to the Operations Coordinating Board for the National Security Council, December 1955 through November 1956’ 15 January 1957 [amended 15 February 1957], p. 58, document no. 1987-70, online, available HTTP: < http://www.ddrs.psmedia.com> (accessed 1 June 2002). ICA, ‘Evaluation Report: Viet-Nam’, n.d. [1956?], p. 110, document no. 1983-66, online, available HTTP: < http://www.ddrs.psmedia.com> (accessed 14 June 2001). William E. Colby, interview by Ted Gittinger, June 2, 1981, interview I, transcript, LBJL. USOM, Barrows to ICA, 9 September 1958, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, General Policy, Guidelines and background, 1961–1963, folder marked ‘IPS#1/Programs/Vietnam/National Police 9/61-12/61’, NACP. DOS, ‘Report on Southeast Asia’, 2 January 1959, Tab c, p. 1, RG 52, DOS General Records, Records Relating to the State Department Participation in the OCB and the NSC, 1947–1963, lot file 62D430, OCB, Lot File 66D95, NSC, marked ‘Overseas Internal Security Program’, NACP. Ibid., tab C, p. 1. USOM, Barrows to ICA, 9 September 1958, p. 3, FRUS, 1958–1960, Vol. I, p. 3; and DOS, Dulles to Vietnam Embassy, 19 January 1959, ibid., p. 135. For more on the termination of the university’s Vietnam program, see Scigliano and Fox, Technical Assistance in Vietnam, pp. 10–12; and Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance, pp. 115–39.

170 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104 105 106

107

108

Notes Scigliano and Fox, Technical Assistance in Vietnam, p. 23. MSUG, ‘Evaluation of Current Situation in Vietnam as it Applies to the MSUG Program’, March 1960, p. 3, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 695, Folder 2, MSUAHC; MSUG, ‘Resume of MSU–USOM Relationships’, p. 2. ICA, Hall to Fitzgerald, 17 September 1958, pp. 3–4, RG 472, MACV/CORDS Civil Guard Records, NACP. MSUG, Sheinbaum to Smuckler, 21 August 1958, p. 1, John Hannah Papers, Administrative Files, International Programs, Vietnam Project, Police Administration, Box 42, Folder 53, MSUAHC. See Chapter 6 for a more detailed discussion of the growing power of the armed communist opposition in the South. Quoted in Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance, pp. 79–80. MSUG, Final Report, p. 3, MSUAHC; and Professor R. Smuckler, interview by author, 17 June 1999, Washington. For a discussion of this growing disillusionment with Diem, see J. Morgan, The Vietnam Lobby: American Friends of Vietnam, 1955–1975, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997, Chapter 5, passim. MSUG, ‘Final Report Covering Activities of the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group for the Period May 20, 1955–June 30, 1962’ Saigon, June 1962, p. 2, MSUAHC. R.B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War, vol. I, Revolution versus Containment, 1955–61, p. 50. Scigliano and Fox, Technical Assistance in Vietnam, p. 67. DOS, American Embassy, Saigon to DOS, 8 July 1960, p. 1. White House [WH], White House, ‘Discussion at the 460th Meeting of the National Security Council, Wednesday, September 21, 1960’, p. 16, document no. 1991-190, online, available HTTP: < http://www.ddrs.psmedia.com> (accessed 15 May 2001). Collins, Development and Training, p. 19. MAAG, ‘MAAG Comments on Recommended 20,000 Increase in RVNAF Force Level’, n.d., FRUS, 1958–1960, Vol. I, p. 701. Spector, Advice and Support, p. 365. MAAG, ‘MAAG Comments’, p. 697 (see note 96). MAAG, McGarr to Fishel, 28 March 1961, Box 1209, Folder 25, Wesley Fishel Papers, MSUAHC. Quoted in R. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds, Boulder, p. 19. MAAG, ‘MAAG Comments’, p. 700 (see note 96). WH, ‘Presidential Program for Viet-Nam’, n.d., p. 4, document no. 1981-645A, online, available HTTP: < http://www.ddrs.psmedia.com> (accessed 1 June 2002); JCS, ‘Project “Beef-Up”’, 24 January 1962, p. 5, document no. 1983-98, online, available HTTP: (accessed 12 February 2001). MAAG, ‘MAAG Comments’, p. 701 (see note 96). WH, ‘Discussion at the 460th NSC Meeting’, p. 17 (see note 94). USVNR, Book II, IV.A.4, p. 23. USOM, Walton to Gardiner, 10 September 1960, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #10 through #10-1/Subversion, Insurgency and Intelligence, 1960–1965, marked ‘IPS #10-1/Intelligence ‘60’, NACP. Testimony of Byron Engle, Director, OPS/AID, US Congress, House, Foreign Assistance and Related Agencies Appropriations for 1973: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess., 3 May 1972, p. 193. Collins, Development and Training, p. 20.

Notes 109

110 111 112

171

DOS, Saigon to DOS, despatch no. 14, 8 July 1960, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, ‘IPS#1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1957–1960’, folder marked ‘IPS#1/Background Information/Vietnam 1960’, NACP. Quoted in Karnow, Vietnam, p. 253. USOM, Hodson to Howe, 17 September 1959, p. 8, MACV/CORDS Civil Guard Records, NACP. Quoted in Spector, Advice and Support, p. 322.

5 The challenge of ‘subterranean war’ 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10

11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18

J.F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, p. 198. Quoted in N. Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, p. 59. Quoted in A.M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, p. 68. See for example ‘Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union’, 11 January 1962, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy [cited hereafter as JFK Public Papers], 1962, Washington, DC: USGPO, 1963, p. 5. The full text of the speech is printed in T. Sorensen, Kennedy, pp. 245–48. In addition to the Schlesinger and Sorensen titles cited above, these early accounts also include R. Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967. B. Kaufman, ‘John F. Kennedy as World Leader: A Perspective on the Literature’, in M. Hogan (ed.), America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941, p. 327. The two most important early revisionist works are D. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, and R. Walton, Cold War and Counter-Revolution: The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy, New York: Viking Press, 1972. See for example H. Parmet, JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy. Noteworthy works in this vein include T. Reeves, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy, New York: Free Press, 1991; and Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power. For a sensationalistic account of Kennedy’s organized crime connections, see S. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot. S. Rabe, ‘Eisenhower Revisionism: The Scholarly Debate’ in Hogan (ed.) America in the World, pp. 302–3. Important revisionist works on Eisenhower include R. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War; R. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower’s Response to the Soviet Satellite; F. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency; and S. Ambrose, Eisenhower, vol. 2, The President. See for example D. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961, pp. 204–5; and R. McMahon, ‘Eisenhower and Third World Nationalism: A Critique of the Revisionists’, Political Science Quarterly 101, 1986. Kaufman, ‘Kennedy as World Leader’, p. 327. L. Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, p. xi. For an account of Kennedy’s failures in Latin America, see S. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America. J. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy; and F. Logevall, ‘Vietnam and the Question of What Might Have Been’, in M. White (ed.), Kennedy: The New Frontier Revisited; and Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, p. 419. M. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963, pp. 25–8. Quoted in F. Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, p. 179.

172 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Notes Ibid., p. 328. J.L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, Oxford: pp. 214–15. Kennedy, Strategy of Peace, p. 194. Giglio, Presidency of John F. Kennedy, pp. 221–2. See for example M. Millikan and W.W. Rostow, A Proposal: Key to an Effective Foreign Policy, pp. 2–13. B. Kaufman, Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953–1961, p. 209. H.W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War, p. 87. Kennedy, Strategy of Peace, n.p. ‘Special Message to the Congress on the Defense Budget’, 28 March 1961, JFK Public Papers, 1961, Washington: USGPO, 1962, p. 236. Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 630. For more on the assassination plots directed against Castro, see T. Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, pp. 119–22 and D. Bohning, The Castro Obsession: US Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959–1965, Washington: Potomac Books, Inc., 2005, particularly chapter 10. S. MacFarlane, ‘Success and Failures in Soviet Policy Toward Marxist Revolutions in the Third World, 1917–1985’, in M. Katz (ed.), The USSR and Marxist Revolutions in the Third World, p. 30. Quoted in J.L. Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 183–4. Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, p. 124. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 773. Department of Justice, Robert Kennedy to the president, 19 April 1961, US Department of State [DOS], FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. X, Cuba, p. 303. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, p. 65. Quoted in D. Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America’s Cold War Victory, p. 297. Central Intelligence Agency [CIA], Special National Intelligence Estimate, ‘Castro’s Subversive Capabilities in Latin America’, 9 November 1962, in FRUS, 1961–1962, vol. X, p. 234. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area, p. 139. For portraits of assorted New Frontiersmen, see Sorensen, Kennedy; Schlesinger, A Thousand Days; Halberstam, The Best and Brightest; G. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern; K. Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers in Arms, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998; Beschloss, The Crisis Years; Hilsman, To Move a Nation; and D. Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara. M. Taylor, The Uncertain Trumpet. C. Maechling, Jr., interview by author, 22 October 1999, Washington, DC; and D. Mayers, ‘JFK’s Ambassadors and the Cold War’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 11, 2000, p. 184. Quoted in Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment, p. 176. W.W. Rostow, The Diffusion of Power: An Essay in Recent History, p. 162; Giglio, Presidency of John F. Kennedy, p. 30. H.W. Brands, The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power, p. 10. Hilsman, To Move a Nation, p. 22. I. Destler, L. Gelb, and A. Lake, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Unmaking of American Foreign Policy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984, p. 193. Hilsman, To Move a Nation, p. 413. ‘The President’s News Conference of February 7, 1962’, JFK Public Papers, 1962, Washington: USGPO, 1963, p. 122.

Notes 48

49

50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67

173

DOS, ‘Internal Defense of the Less Developed World’, 13 March 1961, p. 1, Record Group [RG] 286, US Agency for International Development [AID], Office of Public Safety [OPS], Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #13, Police Operations 1966–1969, folder marked ‘Police Constabulary, 1962–68’, National Archives at College Park, Maryland (cited hereafter as NACP). President’s Committee to Study the United States Military Assistance Program, ‘Supplement to the Composite Report of the President’s Committee to Study the United States Military Assistance Program, vol. III, Classified Studies’, March 1959, pp. 25–39, document no. 1997-190, online, available HHTP: (accessed 21 June 2001). This is the on-line service of the Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS), Research Publications International, Woodbridge, Connecticut and Reading. The document number refers to the microform edition of the DDRS. W. Bundy, forward to The Counterinsurgency Era: US Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present by D. Blaufarb, p. x. J. Hoagland, ‘Changing Patterns of Insurgency and American Response’, Journal of International Affairs 25, p. 130. National Security Council [NSC], draft statement of policy prepared by the senior staff of the NSC, 8 May 1951, FRUS, 1951, vol. I, National Security Affairs: Foreign Economic Policy, Washington: USGPO, 1979) p. 83. Ibid., p. 84. C. Maechling, Jr., ‘Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: The Role of Strategic Theory’, Parameters XIV, 1994, p. 32. This definition is taken from NSC, ‘Report of the Interagency Committee on Police Assistance Programs in Newly Emerging Countries’, 24 July 1962, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File, 1956–74, folder marked ‘IPS 7-1, NSC (Memorandums)’, NACP. Patterson, ‘Introduction’, p. 18; and Rostow, Diffusion of Power, p. 126. T White, ‘The Action Intellectuals,’ Life, 9 June 1967, p. 44. P. Kattenburg, The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945–1975. See for example H. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. Quoted in F. Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power, p. 247. R. Strausz-Hupé, et al., Protracted Conflict, pp. 52–53. W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, 3rd edn, p. 164. Other seminal texts in this field include D. Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society; and G. Almond and J. Coleman (eds), The Politics of Developing Areas. A very useful contemporary discussion of modernization theory can be found in M. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era, particularly pp. 30–68. For a discussion of the related field of behaviouralism and its role in national security policy, see R. Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the MilitaryIndustrial Complex. W.W. Rostow, ‘Guerrilla Warfare in Underdeveloped Areas’, in T.N. Greene (ed.), The Guerrilla – and How to Fight Him: Selections from the Marine Corps Gazette, p. 56. R. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973, p. 132. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 589. Packenham, Liberal America, p. 201. Ibid., p. 229. For a discussion on how the United States applied such notions to the conflict in Vietnam from the mid-1960s onward, see J. Marquis, ‘The Other Warriors: American Social Science and Nation Building in Vietnam’, Diplomatic History 24, 2000.

174 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Notes L. Nadler, ‘The Phantom Factor: Impact of the Cold War on Anthropology’, in N. Chomsky, et al., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, p. 130. L. Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 56. M. Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy. Nick Culluther has traced modernization theory back even farther, identifying it as an outgrowth of ‘the Enlightenment project of ordering and rationalizing society’. N. Calluther, ‘Research Note: Development? It’s History’, Diplomatic History 24, p. 650. Packenham, Liberal America, p. 299; and I. Gendzier, ‘Play it Again Sam: The Practice and Apology of Development’, in C. Simpson (ed.), Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War, p. 70. M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, p. 10. This idea is drawn from D. Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals, p. 28; and C. Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, p. 159. D.M. Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of US Counterinsurgency Policy, 1988, p. 2. Ibid., p. 68. Kattenburg, The Vietnam Trauma, p. 88. Quoted in S. Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes: A Tale of Social Research and the Bureaucracy, p. 28. For example, see H. Eckstein, ‘Introduction’, in H. Eckstein (ed.), Internal War: Problems and Approaches, p. 4; and G. Almond, ‘Comparative Political Systems’, Journal of Politics 18, p. 391. Quoted in Deitchman, Best-Laid Schemes, p.34. Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960–1961, Washington: USGPO, 1962, pp. 1038–9. R. Damms, ‘James Killian, the Technological Capabilities Panel, and the Emergence of President Eisenhower’s “Scientific-Technological Elite”’, Diplomatic History 24, 2000, p. 58. Halberstam, Best and the Brightest, p. 156. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern, p. 183. DOS, ‘Key National Security Problems’, 10 February 1961, Papers of President Kennedy, National Security Files [NSF], Subjects, Reference Copy, Box 301-304, folder marked ‘Policy Planning 1/61-2/10/61’, JFKL. R. Hilsman, ‘Internal War: The New Communist Tactic’, in T.N. Greene (ed.), The Guerrilla, p. 24. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., pp. 30–31. R.B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam War, Volume I, Revolution versus Containment, 1955–61, p. 252. DOS, Ramsey for the record, 20 March 1961, p. 1, RG 59, General Records of DOS, Records of the Policy Planning Staff, 1957–1961, lot file 67D548, folder marked ‘Internal Defense-Counter Guerrilla’, NACP. See for example R. McNamara, ‘The Secretary of Defense Answers the Third Challenge’, in US Department of the Army, Special Warfare US Army, Washington, DC: Chief of Information, US Army, n.d., pp. 12–13. DOS, airgram no. CA-2432 from Rusk, 10 April 1962, p. 2, RG 52, National Security Action Memoranda Files, 1961–1968, NSAM 91-115 to NSAM 116-130, folder marked ‘NSAM 91-115’, NACP. Editorial note attached to National Security Memorandum No. 182, 24 August 1962, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. VIII, National Security Policy, pp. 382–3. Given its importance as a statement of Kennedy administration policy, it is curious that the FRUS editors did not include the complete OISP text, but merely summarized it in an editorial attachment to National Security Memorandum No. 182.

Notes 93 94 95 96

97 98 99

100 101 102

103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

114 115 116 117 118

175

Smith, International History, p. 244. See for example ‘Special Message to Congress on Foreign Aid’, 22 March 1961, pp. 203–12. N.Eberstadt, Foreign Aid and American Purpose, pp. 33–4. US AID, ‘A Brief History of Foreign Assistance’, online, available HTTP: (accessed 6 February 2002). For more on the Kennedy administration’s foreign aid policies and re-organization, see V. Ruttan, United States Development Assistance Policy: The Domestic Politics of Foreign Economic Assistance, Chapter 5; and W. Thorp, The Reality of Foreign Aid, pp. 50–2. Maechling, ‘Insurgency and Counterinsurgency’, p. 33. S. Marquis, Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding US Special Operations Forces, pp. 11–12. M. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, p. 35. For a useful discussion of how the US army and the other services define themselves and their missions, see C. Builder, The Masks of War: American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis, particularly Chapters 1–2. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, p. 56. Sorensen, Kennedy, pp. 632–3. See for example DOS, ‘Interdepartmental Seminar: Problems of Development and Internal Defense’, 11 March–12 April 1963, p. 11, RG 59, Executive Secretariat, Records of the Special Group (CI), 1962–1966, Lot 68D451, folder marked ‘Special Group (CI), 3/14/63-4/18/63’, NACP. Public Record Office [PRO] COS(62)304, 21.8.62, DEFE11/158, British Embassy (Washington) to Foreign Office, 19 June 1962. Maechling interview, 22 October 1999. For an example of Kennedy’s impatience with the military, see WH, Kennedy to McNamara, 11 January 1962, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. VIII, p. 235. Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, p. 134. WH, Taylor to the president, 30 July 1962, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. VIII, pp. 352–5. M. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1972, p. 201. R. Amory, Jr., interview by J. O’Connor, 9 February 1966, Washington, transcript, JFKL. R. Komer, ‘Blowtorch’, unpublished manuscript, Chapter 4, p. 11. NSC, Komer to Rostow, 4 May 1961, p. 1, Working Files for Komer and Saunders, NSF Open Boxes 413-414 [cited hereafter as Komer Files], folder marked ‘Counterinsurgency Police Programs, White House Memoranda, 5/61-10/63’, JFKL. DOS, ‘Internal Defense of the less developed world’, 13 March 1961, RG 286, AID, OPS, VN Division, Subject File, IPS#13, Police ops 1966–1969, folder marked ‘police constabulary, 1962–69’, NACP, p. 5. NSC, ‘Intelligence Inputs to “New Look” at Our LIMWAR Posture’, 14 February 1961, p. 5, National Security File [NSF], Subjects, Staff Memoranda, Box 325, folder marked ‘Staff memorandum, Walt W. Rostow, Guerrilla and Unconventional Warfare, 2/1/61-2/16/61’, JFKL. NSC, Komer to Maechling, 3 May 1962, p. 5, Komer Files, folder marked ‘Counterinsurgency Police Program (White House Memoranda 5/61-10/63)’, JFKL. DOS, ‘Internal Defense of the less developed world’, 13 March 1961, RG 286, AID, OPS, VN Division, Subject File, IPS#13, Police ops 1966–1969, folder marked ‘police constabulary, 1962–69’, NACP, p. 11. Komer to Maechling, 3 May 1962, p. 4. Ibid., p. 6. See for example WH, Kennedy to the secretary of state and the secretary of defense, April 17, 1962, p. 1, Komer Files, folder marked ‘Counterinsurgency Police Programs, General, 1961–1963 [Folder 1 of 2]’, JFKL.

176

Notes

119

‘Draft Speech to be given by Director, IAPA [Inter-American Police Academy] to the USSOUTHCOM Conference of Military Group Commanders, 9–11 September 1963’, n.d., pp. 10–11, RG 286, OPS, Training Division, Subject Files, 1963–72, Police Operations–Venezuela, folder marked ‘Information and Mass Communication’, NACP. DOS, ‘Internal Defense of the less developed world’, 13 March 1961, RG 286, AID, OPS, VN Division, Subject File, IPS#13, Police ops 1966–1969, folder marked ‘police constabulary, 1962–69’, NACP, pp. 13–21. Packenham, Liberal America, pp. 157–9. T. Lobe, ‘US Police Assistance for the Third World’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, p. 96. This theme will be explored in greater depth in Chapter 7 below. WH, NSAM 114, ‘Training for Friendly Police and Armed Forces in CounterInsurgency, Counter-Subversion, Riot Control and Related Matters’, 22 November 1961, p. 1, RG 52, National Security Action Memoranda Files, 1961–1968, NSAM 91-115 to NSAM 116-130, folder marked ‘NSAM 91-115’, NACP. ‘US Overseas Internal Defense Policy Guidelines’ [Third Draft], n.d. [June 1962?], RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File, 1956–74, folder marked ‘IPS 1, General Policy, Guidelines, Background’, NACP. WH, NSAM 162, ‘Development of US and Indigenous Police, Paramilitary and Military Resources’, 16 June 1962, RG 273, NSAMs 130-240, folder marked ‘NSAM 162’, NACP. WH, ‘Report of the Interagency Committee on Police Assistance’, p. 6. Ibid., p. 6. DOS, Johnson to Taylor, 17 April 1962, p. 2, RG 59, Executive Secretariat, Records of the Special Group (CI), 1962–1966, Lot 68D451, folder marked ‘Special Group (CI), 1/1/62 to 12/28/62’, NACP. AID, Coffin to the president, 1 December 1962, pp. 2–4, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File 1956–74, IPS 7-1 to 7-2, ‘IPS 7-2 Special Group (CI) Meetings December 1962’, NACP. NSC, Maechling to Chenery, ‘Cutbacks in Police Programs’, 29 January 1962, p. 1, RG 59, Executive Secretariat, Records of the Special Group (C-I), 1962–1966, Lot 68D451, folder marked ‘Special Group (CI), 1/1/62 through 7/31/62’, NACP. NSC, Komer to McGB [McGeorge Bundy], 7 February 1962, p. 1, Komer Files, folder marked ‘Counterinsurgency Police Program (White House Memoranda 5/61–10/63)’, JFKL. U.A. Johnson, with J. Olivarius McAllister, The Right Hand of Power, p. 335. See also P. Hatcher, The Suicide of an Elite: American Internationalists and Vietnam, p. 227. R. Komer, interview by Elizabeth Farmer, September 3, 1964, Third Oral History Interview, transcript, JFKL. See for example the testimony of J. Wolf, AID’s special assistant for internal defense, US Congress, House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Castro-Communist Subversion in the Western Hemisphere: Hearings before the Subcommittee on InterAmerican Affairs, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 4 March 1963, p. 232. NSC, McGeorge Bundy to Taylor, 14 February 1962, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. VIII, p. 24; WH, NSAM 132, February 19, 1962, ibid., p. 249. NSC, Komer to Dungan, 6 April 1962, p.1, Komer Files, folder marked ‘Counterinsurgency Police Program (White House Memoranda, 5/61–10/63)’, JFKL. NSC, Komer to Carl [Kaysen], 22 June 1962, p. 1, ibid. WH, Komer to McGeorge Bundy and Taylor, 18 April 1962, p. 1, document no. 1571, DDRS, May–June 1995 (microfiche). Lobe, ‘US Police Assistance’, pp. 48–9. WH, NSAM 146, 20 April 1962, RG 273, National Security Action Memoranda (NSAM), 130-240, folder marked ‘NSAM 146’, NACP.

120 121 122 123

124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

135 136 137 138 139 140

Notes 141

142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154

155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165

177

The panel included Komer as well as senior officials from AID, the Bureau of the Budget, the Justice Department, and the CIA. WH, ‘Memorandum from the Interagency Committee on Police Assistance Programs to President Kennedy’, July 20, 1962, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. VIII, p. 348. The FRUS volume does not include the twenty-two-page report itself. Several versions exist. The most complete, cited above in note 55, contains information on CIA programs that is redacted in other versions. WH, ‘Report of the Interagency Committee on Police Assistance’, 24 July 1962, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File, 1956–74, folder marked ‘IPS 7–1, NSC (Memorandums)’, NACP. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 22. NSC, ‘Memorandum from the Interagency Committee’, p. 346, (see note 141). NSC , ‘Report of the Interagency Committee on Police Assistance’, p. 7, (see note 55). WH, NSAM 177, 7 August 1962, pp. 1–2, RG 286, OPS, Director, General Records, 1957–74, 8 Pakistan-8F Venezuela, folder marked ‘IPS History References’, NACP. AID General Notice, ‘Office of Public Safety (O/PS)’, 1 November 1962, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File, 1956–74, folder marked ’IPS 1, General Policy Guidelines, Background (OPS Policy Papers) FY62-72, Folder 2’, NACP. NSC, ‘Measures to Strengthen AID’s Police Assistance Program’, 30 November 1962, p. 1, Komer Files, folder marked ‘Counterinsurgency Police Programs, General, 1961–1963 (Folder 2 of 2)’, JFKL. C. Maechling, Jr., ‘Camelot, Robert Kennedy, and Counter-Insurgency: A Memoir’, Virginia Quarterly Review 75, 1999, p. 451. Lobe, ‘US Police Assistance’, p. 58. C. Maechling, Jr., ‘Counterinsurgency: The First Ordeal by Fire’, in M. Klare and P. Kornbluh (eds), Low-Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency and Antiterrorism in the Eighties, p. 33. AID, Coffin to the president, 1 December 1962, pp. 2–4. ‘Regional Programs, FY 1963 Public Safety’, 4 December 1962, pp. 1–2, Komer Files, folder marked ‘Counterinsurgency Police Programs, General, 1961–1963 (Folder 2 of 2)’, JFKL. The General Accounting Office (GAO), an investigative arm of Congress, arrived at somewhat different figures for this period. According to the GAO, AID was supplying roughly $25 million in police assistance to thirty-nine countries. GAO, Stopping US Assistance to Foreign Police and Prisons, ID-76-5, Washington: USGPO, 19 February 1976, p. 9. AID, Bell to the Special Group (C-I), 15 August 1963, p. 1, Komer Files, ‘Counterinsurgency Police Programs, General, 1961–1963 (Folder 2 of 2)’, JFKL. Giglio, Presidency of John F. Kennedy, p. 224. AID, ‘Ruffner to the deputy administrator’, 25 April 1962, p. 4, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File 1956–74, IPS 1-1 to 2-3, folder marked ‘General Reports and Statistics (Public Safety Summaries)’, NACP. Author’s interview with Maechling, 22 October 1999. J. Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911–1939, p. 9–10. H. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture, p. 113. M. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945–1968, p. 43. G. Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man, p. 577. Latham, Modernisation as Ideology, p. 215. This point is developed further in J. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, particularly pp. 87–102. R. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, p. 207. R. Tomes, Apocalypse Then: American Intellectuals and the Vietnam War, 1954–1975, pp. 49–50; and H.T. Wilson, The American Ideology: Science,

178

166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181

182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189

Notes Technology, and Organisation as Modes of Rationality in Advanced Industrial Societies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, pp. 15–16. P. Cleaves, ‘Implementation amidst Scarcity and Apathy: Political Power and Policy Design’, in M. Grindle (ed.), Politics and Policy Implementation in the Third World, p. 294; Packenham, Liberal America, p. 116. See for example DOS, McGhee to McGeorge Bundy, 21 November 1961, Komer Files, folder marked ‘Counterinsurgency-Special Group, General, 2/61-4/62 and Undated’, JFKL. Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965, p. 87. Maechling, ‘Insurgency and Counterinsurgency’, p. 33. For a discussion on the indirect nature of the American role in the campaign against the Huks, see Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, pp. 22–40. C. Maechling, Jr., ‘Our Internal Defense Policy – A Reappraisal’, Foreign Service Journal, 46, p. 27. WH, Dingeman for the record, 19 April 1963, p. 1, RG 59, Records of the Special Group (CI), 1962–1966, Lot 68D451, folder marked ‘Special Group (CI), 3/14/634/18/63’, NACP. Quoted in T. Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police, p. 10. See for example E. Lefever, Spear and Scepter: Army, Police and Politics in Tropical Africa, p. 221. O. Marenin, ‘United States Aid to African Police Forces: The Experience and Impact of the Public Safety Assistance Programme’, African Affairs 85, 1996, p. 528. O.W. Wilson, and R. McLaren, Police Administration, 3rd edn., New York: McGrawHill Book Company, 1972. Marenin, ‘United States Aid’, pp. 528–9. A. Hills, Policing Africa: Internal Security and the Limits of Liberalization, p. 8. M. Cottam and O. Marenin, ‘Predicting the Past: Reagan Administration Assistance to Police Forces in Central America’, Justice Quarterly 6, p. 601. R. Holden, ‘Securing Central America Against Communism: the United States and the Modernization of Surveillance in the Cold War’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 41, p. 2. During the 1960–4 period, total US government spending grew from $76.5 billion to $98.8 billion, with 81 percent ($14.5 billion) going to national defense, foreign aid, and other ‘war related’ programs. Rep. Morris K. Udall, ‘Congressman’s Report’, 28 February 1963, online, available HTTP: (accessed 17 September 2004). Marenin, ‘United States Aid’, p. 517. For a discussion of American hubris with respect to defeating insurgency in the developing world, see Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, p. 310, and Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, p. 283. D. Bayley, ‘Who Are We Kidding? Or Developing Democracy Through Police Reform’, in Policing in Emerging Democracies: Workshop Papers and Highlights, p. 62. J. Hershberg, ‘The Crisis Years, 1958–1963’, in Odd Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, p. 303. Latham, Modernisation as Ideology, p. 197. Quotation online, available HTTP: < http://www.bartleby.com/66/23/32523.html> (accessed 17 September 2004). Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars, p. 30. ‘Special Message to Congress’, 22 March 1961, Public Papers of JFK (1961), p. 205.

Notes 190 191 192

179

See for example AID, Bell to Special Group (C-I), 15 August 1963, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, office of director, numerical file 1956–1974, IPS 7-2, folder marked ‘Special Group (CI) meetings–August 1963’, NACP. DOS, ‘Internal Defense of the Less Developed World’, 13 march 1961, p.5, RG286, AID, OPS, VN Division, Subject File, IPS#13, Police ops 1966–1969, folder marked ‘police constabulary, 1962–69’ NACP. G. Palmer, The McNamara Strategy and the Vietnam War: Program Budgeting in the Pentagon, 1960–1968, Contributions in Political Science, No. 13, p. 5.

6 Paramilitary forces and the Strategic Hamlet Program 1 2

3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Quoted in R. McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia Since World War II, p. 79. See for example D. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: US Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present, pp. 103–25; D. Duncanson, Government and Revolution in Vietnam, pp. 325–7, 362–3; and M. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990, pp. 82–4, 146–8. See M. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era, particularly Chapter 5. See for example P. Catton, ‘Parallel Agendas: The Ngo Dinh Diem Regime, the United States, and the Strategic Hamlet Program, 1961–1963’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis. See in particular I. Beckett, ‘Robert Thompson and the British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam, 1961–1965’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 8, 1997; and Peter Busch, ‘Supporting the War: Britain’s Decision to Send the Thompson Mission to Vietnam, 1960–61’ Cold War History 2, 2001. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, p. 299. Qiang, Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975, pp. 113–6; and Ang Cheng Guan, Vietnamese Communists’ Relations with China and the Second Indochina Conflict, 1956–1962, p. 233. A.J. Langguth, Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975, p. 102. US Department of Defense [DOD], USVNR, Washington: USGPO, 1971, vol. 3, IV.B.3, p. ii. B. Fall, ‘The Theory and Practice of Counterinsurgency’, Naval War College Review LI, 1998, p. 54. Quoted in W.W. Rostow, The Diffusion of Power: An Essay in Recent History, p. 265. J.L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, p. 212; T. Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 651. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, Washington: USGPO, 1964, p. 659. Quoted in F. Logevall, ‘Vietnam and the Question of What Might Have Been’, in M. White (ed.), Kennedy: The New Frontier Revisited, p. 37. R. Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, pp. 141–4. See for example D. Bell (ed.), The Radical Right. Quoted in R. Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, p. 301. R. Divine, ‘Vietnam: An Episode in the Cold War’, in L. Gardner and T. Gittenger (eds), Vietnam: The Early Decisions, p. 19. T. Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention: An Inside Account of How the Johnson Policy of Escalation in Vietnam was Reversed, p. 21. White House [WH], National Security Memorandum [NSAM] No. 182, 24 August 1962, US Department of State [DOS], FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. VIII, National Security Policy, pp. 382–3.

180 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Notes Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965, p. 86. WH, Rostow to the president, 11 November 1991, FRUS 1961–1963, vol. I, Vietnam, 1988, p. 575. NSC, notes on NSC meeting, 15 November 1961, in ibid., pp. 607–8. WH, Taylor to the president, 3 November 1961 (attachment 2), in ibid., p. 481. Ibid., p. 493. Ibid., pp. 491–3. For more on Kennedy’s response to the Taylor–Rostow report, see R. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, pp. 38–40. WH, Bundy to Rusk, NSAM no. 111, 22 November 1961, pp. 1–2, online, available HTTP: < http://www.jfklibrary.org/images/nsam111a.jpg> (accessed 17 September 2004); and Logevall, ‘Vietnam and the Question of What Might Have Been’, p. 19. A. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam, 1986, p. 64. Deborah Shapley, Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara, p. 150. WH, Kennedy to Rusk and McNamara, 30 January 1961, p. 1, John F. Kennedy National Security Files, Vietnam, 1961–1963, Bethesda, Maryland: University Press of America, 1991, document no. 1-0006, microfilm. USVNR, vol. 11, p. 133; and Duncanson, Government and Revolution, p. 307. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking in Vietnam, Senator Gravel Edition, vol. II, Boston: Beacon Press, n.d. [1971], p. 19. International Cooperation Administration [ICA] Lowe to Jessup, 26 April 1961, pp. 2–3, Record Group [RG] 286, Records of the Agency for International Development [AID], Office of Public Safety [OPS], Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background, folder marked ‘IPS#1/Programs/Vietnam/National Police 1/61-4/61’, NACP. MAAG, McGarr to US ambassador, 24 January 1961, p. 1, in RG 286, OPS, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS#1, General Policy, Guidelines, and Background, folder marked ‘IPS#1/Civil Guard/Self-Defense, ‘61’, NACP. Public Record Office [PRO], FO371/160157, DV1202/3, letter from Chancery [Saigon] to Police Section [Singapore], 14 February 1961. ICA, Walton to the director, 31 January 1961, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background, folder marked ‘IPS#1/Civil Guard/Self-Defense, ‘61’, NACP. This point is made in Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam; and L. Cable, Conflict of Myths: The Development of American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War, New York and London: New York University Press, 1986. A. Jordan, Jr., Foreign Aid and the Defense of Southeast Asia, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publisher, 1962, p. 223. Pentagon Papers, vol. II, pp. 650–1. Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS], Parker to Lemnitzer, 18 December 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. I, p. 743. USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.3, p. iv. R. Scigliano, South Vietnam: Nation Under Stress, pp. 166–7. Pentagon Papers, II: 134. As of 1966, the country had 2,558 villages, each of which contained three to five hamlets. H. Smith, et al., Area Handbook for South Vietnam, Department of the Army Pamphlet 550–5, Washington: USGPO, April 1967, p. 214. Langguth, Our Vietnam, p. 168. Catton, ‘Parallel Agendas’, p. 14. MAAG, McGarr to Thuan, 13 March 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. I, p. 45. USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.2, p. 3.

Notes 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

181

Ibid., p. 10. USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.2, p. 2. Cao Van Vien and Dong Van Khuyen, Reflections on the Vietnam War, Indochina Monographs, p. 19. USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.2, p. 2. R. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds, p. 22; and P. Hatcher, The Suicide of an Elite: American Internationalists and Vietnam, Stanford, California: p. 232. See for example Republic of Vietnam, Seven Years of the Ngo Dinh Diem Administration, 1954–1961, Saigon: Information Printing Office, October 26, 1961, pp. 50–5. Catton, ‘Parallel Agendas’, p. 210. For a discussion of Nhan-vi (also translated as ‘humanism’), see Nghiem Dang, ‘Local Politics and Administration’, in Wesley R. Fishel (ed.), Vietnam: Anatomy of a Conflict, pp. 570–3. G. Shaw, ‘Policemen versus Soldiers, the Debate Leading to MAAG Objections and Washington’s Rejections of the Core of the British Counter-Insurgency Advice’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 12, p. 58. Beckett, ‘Robert Thompson’, pp. 41–4. An overview of the Briggs Plan can be found in R. Clutterbuck, The Long, Long War: Counterinsurgency in Malaya and Vietnam, pp. 55–64. R. Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam, p. 85. D. Killingray, ‘Securing the British Empire: Policing and Colonial Order, 1920–1960’, in M. Mazower (ed.), The Politics of Policing in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives, p. 170. D. Anderson and D. Killingray, ‘Consent, Coercion and Colonial Control: Policing the Empire, 1830–1940’, in D. Anderson and D. Killingray, Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940, p. 4–9; and M. Macoun, Wrong Place, Right Time: Policing the End of Empire, pp. xvi–xviii. Bruce Hoffman defines Special Branch as ‘the plainclothes division responsible specifically for monitoring subversive groups and political crimes’. Bruce Hoffman and Jennifer Morrison Taw, A Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Insurgency, N-3506-DOS, p. 9. C. Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community, p. 17. D. Killingray and D. Anderson, ‘An Orderly Retreat? Policing the End of Empire’, in D. Anderson and D. Killingray (eds), Policing and Decolonialisation: Nationalism, Politics and the Police, 1917–65, p. 15. R. Rathbone, ‘Political Intelligence and Policing in Ghana in the late 1940s and 1950s’, in ibid., pp. 97–9. NSC, ‘Report of the Interagency Committee on Police Assistance Programs in Newly Emerging Countries’, 24 July 1962, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File, 1956–74, folder marked ‘IPS 7-1, NSC (Memorandums)’, NACP. A.A. Castagno, ‘The Somali National Police Force and AID Assistance’, unpublished paper, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California, n.d., p. 3; and NSC, ‘Report of the Interagency Committee’, 24 July 1962, pp. 20–2. PRO DO169/109, ‘United Kingdom assistant to South Vietnam: Proposals by the Foreign Office’, 21 July 1961; and R. Thompson, Head for the Hills: Memories of Far Eastern Wars, London: Leo Cooper, 1989, p. 122. Busch, ‘Supporting the War’, p. 73. PRO DO169/109, ‘United Kingdom Assistant to South Vietnam, Minutes of a Meeting Held on June 13 [1961]’. Busch, ‘Supporting the War’, p. 75.

182 73 74

75 76 77 78 79

80 81

82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Notes DOS, memorandum of conversation, 7 August 1961, FRUS, 1961–63, vol. I, p. 268. PRO FO/371/136164, DV1641/8, ‘Report on Visit of Police Adviser to Vietnam, 21st–27th November, 1958’, 12 December 1958. The police advisor was attached to the Office of the Commissioner-General for the United Kingdom in South East Asia, headquartered in Singapore. PRO DO169/109, Office of Commissioner-General for South East Asia [Singapore] to Foreign Office, July 3, 1961, telegram no. 245. Busch, ‘Supporting the War’, pp. 75–7. W. Colby and P. Forbath, Honourable Men: My Life in the CIA, p. 175. MAAG, McGarr to Lemnitzer, 7 June 1961, FRUS, 1961–63, vol. I, pp. 166–7. Ibid., p. 167; MAAG to Saigon to CINCPAC [Commander in Chief, Pacific], 9 August 1961, pp. 1–2, RG 218, Records of the JCS, Central Decimal File, 1961, 9155.3/3360 Vietnam (4 January 61) Sec. 1 to 9155.3/9105 Vietnam (26 October 1961) Sect. 1, folder marked ‘9155.3/3360 Vietnam (9 August 1961)’ (abbreviated hereafter as RG 218, JCS Vietnam 1961), NACP. WH, Rostow to president, 21 April 1961, p. 2, Papers of President Kennedy, National Security Files [NSF], Subjects, Reference Copy, Box 301-304, ‘Policy Planning 2/11/61-5/61’, JFKL. DOS, ‘Kennedy-Macmillan Nassau Meeting’, 13 December 1962, p. 2, document no. 1978-295C, online, available HTTP: (accessed 22 January 2001). This is the on-line service of the Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS), Research Publications International, Woodbridge, Connecticut and Reading. The document number refers to the microfiche edition of the DDRS. L. Gelb, with R. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked, p. 85. See for example T.E. Greene, ‘Notes on the Thompson Report on South Vietnam, and Discussion with R.G.K. Thompson’, D(L) No. 9937-ARPA, unpublished paper, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California, 9 April 1962. Thompson, Head for the Hills, p. 128. PRO DO169/109, Stewart to FO, June 12, 1961, telegram no. 328. In addition to Thompson, BRIAM included Dennis J. Duncanson, a former member of the Malayan civil service; Jock Hindmarsh, a retired policeman; and Desmond Palmer, who had a background in intelligence. Beckett, ‘Robert Thompson’, p. 45. Duncanson would go on to write an important study of the Vietnam conflict, Government and Revolution in Vietnam, cited above. British Advisory Mission to Vietnam [BRIAM], ‘Appreciation of Vietnam, November 1961–April 1962’, 27 October 1961, p. 5, RG 218, JCS Vietnam 1961, NACP. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 10. Greene, ‘Notes on the Thompson Report’, p. 11. BRIAM, ‘Appreciation of Vietnam’, 27 October 1961, p. 10 (see note 86). USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.2, p. 11. Quoted in USVNR, vol. 11, p. 351. BRIAM, Thompson, draft paper, n.d., FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. II, Vietnam, pp. 104–7. PRO FO 371/160164, DV1641/1, ‘Police Training Serial 109, Vietnam, Visit of Director and Senior Officers of Civil Guard to Federation of Malaysia’, September 1, 1961. Shaw, ‘Policemen versus Soldiers’, p. 56. See Chapter 7 below. Beckett, ‘Robert Thompson’, p. 54. MAAG, McGarr to Felt, 18 November 1961, pp. 16–18, RG 218, JCS Vietnam 1961, NACP. D. Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson and the origins of the Vietnam War, Cambridge, p. 144.

Notes 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

183

A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, p. 549. W. Duiker, US Containment Policy and the Conflict in Indochina, p. 280. Beckett, ‘Robert Thompson’, p. 47. R. Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy, p. 438. M. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963, p. 650. Ibid., p. 428. USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.2, p. 14. J. Nashel, ‘The Road to Vietnam: Modernization Theory in Fact and Fiction’, in C. Appy (ed.), Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000, p. 141. Hilsman, To Move a Nation, p. 426. F. Nolting, From Trust to Tragedy: The Political Memoirs of Frederick Nolting, Kennedy’s Ambassador to Diem’s Vietnam, p. 36. USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.2, pp. 21, 33. DOS, ‘Strategic Concept for South Vietnam’ 2 February 1962, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. II, pp. 78–9. MACV, Harkins to Felt, 19 January 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. III, Vietnam: January–August 1963, p. 42. Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS], ‘JCS Team Report on South Vietnam’, January 1963, ibid., pp. 84–5. USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.2, p. 13. W. Crouch, Jr, ‘The Role of Paramilitary Forces in the Vietnamese Insurgency, 1960–1965: A Case Study’, USAWC Research Paper, p. 23. JCS, ‘JCS Team Report’, January 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. II, pp. 86–7. J. Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province, pp. 113–15. Latham, Modernization as Ideology, p. 178. Duiker, US Containment Policy, p. 28; and USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.2., p. 18. Quoted in M. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945–1968, p. 62. DOS, Heavner to Wood, 1 August 1963, p. 1, RG 59, DOS General Records, Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs, Vietnam Working Group: Briefing Books, 1963–1966, PolPolitical Affairs and Rel. Gen. 1963 to Pol 26 Coup Rumors, in folder marked ‘Political Affairs and Rel. Pol 23 Internal Security’, NACP. MACV, Harkins to Diem, 15 May 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. III, pp. 298–99. AID, Phillips, ‘A Report on Counter-insurgency in Vietnam’, 31 August 1962, p. 19, Roger Hilsman Papers, Countries, Philippines–Vietnam, 8/30/63-8/31/63 and Undated, Box No. 3, folder marked ‘Vietnam 7/28/62-1/31/61’, JFKL. D. Rusk, ‘The Stake in Viet-Nam’, Department of State Bulletin XLVII, May 13, 1963, p. 730. For an example of Thompson’s later criticism, see R. Thompson, No Exit from Vietnam, pp.125–8. DOS, memorandum of conversation, 1 April 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. III, pp. 193–4, 198–202. W. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, pp. 530–1. W. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam, p. 154. USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.2, p. 22. Insightful accounts of the coup can be found in E. Hammer, A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963 and R. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975, pp. 119–123. Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency, p. 141; Duncanson, Government and Revolution, pp. 326–7.

184

Notes

132 133 134

A. Short, The Origins of the Vietnam War, p. 261. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, p. 538; and McNamara, In Retrospect, p. 42. W. Colby, Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America’s Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam, p. 61. Quoted in J. Trullinger, Jr., Village at War: An Account of Revolution in Vietnam, p. 86. See for example WH, ‘Report of the Interagency Committee on Police Assistance Programs in newly Emerging Countries’, 24 July 1962, RG 286, OPS, Director, Numerical File, 1956–74, folder marked ‘IPS 7-1, NSC (Memorandums)’, NACP. DOD, [William P.] Bundy to McNamara, 5 March 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. III, p. 131. As of April 1963, 281 of MACV’s 1,351 advisors were supporting the paramilitary forces. USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.3, p. 32. USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.3, p. 33. O. Schwab, Defending the Free World: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and the Vietnam War, 1961–1965, p. 43. See for example DOS, memorandum for the record, 18 July 1962, p. 3, RG 59, Records of the Policy Planning Staff, 1957–1961, Lot 69D121, folder marked ‘Vietnam 1962’, NACP. PRO FO371/166758, DV1641/15, ‘Police Training Serial 114 – Vietnam, Visit of Nguyon Van Y, Director General of National Police and Sûreté, Vietnam, to the Federation of Malaya’, n.d. [July 1962]. Tran Ngoc Chau, ‘My War Story: From Ho Chi Minh to Ngo Dinh Diem’, in H. Neese and J. O’Donnell (eds), Prelude to Tragedy: Vietnam, 1960–1965, Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2001, pp. 193–4. USVNR, vol. 3, IV.B.3, p. 34. See for example DOD, Gilpatric to the president, 8 June 1962, p. 1, document no. 1998-8, accessed at HTTP:. R. Hilsman, ‘Vietnam: The Decisions to Intervene’, in Jonathan R. Adelman (ed.), Superpowers and Revolution, p. 125. M. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, p. 28. Krepinevich, The Army and Vietnam, p. 5. Cao and Dong, Reflections on the Vietnam War, p. 16.

135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148

7 The Kennedy administration and civilian police reform in South Vietnam 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8

D. Duncanson, Government and Revolution in Vietnam, p. 259; Public Record Office [PRO] FO371/170100, DV1017/17, Thompson memorandum, March 11, 1963; and G.K. Tanham, ‘Trip Report – Vietnam, January 1963’, D(L) No. 11080, unpublished paper, p. 11. R. Komer, Bureaucracy at War: US Performance in the Vietnam Conflict, pp. 136–7. This argument is also advanced in US Department of Defense [DOD], The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking in Vietnam, Senator Gravel Edition, vol. I, Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, p. 256. D. Andradé, Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War, pp. 147–54. J. Clifford, ‘Bureaucratic Politics’, in M. Hogan and T. Paterson (eds), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, p. 148. See for example G. Allison, The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis; and M. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy. US Department of State [DOS], Rusk to embassy in Vietnam, 21 February 1962, FRUS,1961–1963, vol. II, Vietnam, pp. 160–61. Tran Dinh Tho, Pacification, Indochina Monographs, pp. 47–8. DOS, memorandum for Special Group (CI), 26 June 1962, p. 2, document no. 2232, Declassified Documents Reference System [DDRS] (Woodbridge, Connecticut and Reading, Research Publications International, July–August 1995), microfiche.

Notes 9

10 11

12

13 14

15 16 17

18

19 20 21 22

23 24

185

Agency for International Development [AID], Gaud to Komer, 21 December 1965, p. 1, Special Files, Public Service, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Subject File, Komer, Robert W., Box 481, Averell Harriman Papers, Manuscript Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. As with the Eisenhower period, the precise dollar amount of the Kennedy administration’s support for the Vietnamese police is difficult to determine, as the relevant US government records offer conflicting figures. M. Hunt, Lyndon Johnson’s War: America’s Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945–1968, p. 66. AID, ‘The AID Public Safety Program’, n.d., p. 6, Record Group [RG] 286, AID, Office of Public Safety [OPS], Office of the Director, Numerical File 1956–74, IPS 7-1 to 7-2, folder marked ‘IPS 7-2 Special Group (CI) Meetings prior to November 1962’, NACP. G. Tanham, Trial in Thailand, pp. 116–17; and D. Wilson, The United States and the Future of Thailand, New York and London: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1970, pp. 38–40. For more on the US police assistance program in Thailand, see T. Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police, particularly pp. 13–42. The definitive account in English of the insurgency can be found in T. Marks, Making Revolution: The Insurgency of the Communist Party of Thailand in Structural Perspective, Studies in Contemporary Thailand No. 3, Bangkok: White Lotus Co., Ltd, 1994. DOS, Hilsman to Harriman, 18 June 1962, p. 4, Roger Hilsman Papers, Countries, Philippines–Vietnam, Box 3, folder marked ‘Vietnam 3/1/62-7/27/62’, JFKL. Public Safety Division/United States Operations Mission [PSD/USOM], ‘Summary Description of Vietnam Public Safety Project’, 4 February 1963, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1961–1963, folder marked ‘IPS #1/General Policy, Programs/Vietnam/NP 1/63-4/63’, NACP. Quoted in M. Klare, ‘Policing the Empire’, in A. Platt and L. Cooper (eds), Policing America, p. 62. PSD/USOM, memorandum of conversation, 30 October 1961, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #12-4/Training, 1960–1962, folder marked ‘IPS #12-4/Training/Vietnam ‘61’, NACP. R. Holden, ‘Securing Central America Against Communism: the United States and the Modernization of Surveillance in the Cold War’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 41, p. 5; and J. Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, revised edn, p. 650. National Security Council [NSC], ‘Report of the Interagency Committee on Police Assistance Programs in Newly Emerging Countries’, 24 July 1962, p. 6, RG 286, OPS, Office of the Director, Numerical File, 1956–74, IPS 7-1 to 7-2, folder marked ‘IPS 7-1, NSC (Memorandums)’, NACP. Ibid., p. 6. W. Colby, with J. McCargar, Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America’s SixteenYear Involvement in Vietnam, p. 83. Duncanson, Government and Revolution, pp. 255–6. PSD/USOM, Forney to Walton, 15 August 1963, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #10 through #10-1/Subversion, Insurgency and Intelligence, 1960–1965, folder marked ‘IPS #10-1/Intelligence/Vietnam (L-1 to 178) Folder II, 1963, 1964’, NACP. USOM, Annual Report for Fiscal Year 1962 (n.p., n.d.), p. 72. PSD/USOM, Gardiner to Ambassador [Nolting], 24 June 1961, p. 2, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background, folder marked ‘IPS #1/Civil Guard/Self-Defense ‘61’, NACP.

186 25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

37 38

39 40

41 42 43 44

Notes PSD/USOM, Walton to Gardiner, 12 May 1961, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #10 through #10-1, Subversion, Insurgency and Intelligence, folder marked ‘IPS #10/Counterinsurgency in Vietnam (photos), 1961–1962’, NACP. DOD, USVNR, 1945–1967, vol. 11, Washington: USGPO, 1971, p. 345. Tran Ngoc Chau, ‘My War Story: From Ho Chi Minh to Ngo Dinh Diem’, in H. Neese and J. O’Donnell (eds), Prelude to Tragedy: Vietnam, 1960–1965, Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2001, pp. 195. J. Brewer, et al., The Police, Public Order and the State: Policing in Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, the USA, Israel, South Africa, and China, p. 13. For a comparison between the British approach to law enforcement and more authoritarian law-enforcement styles, see C. Horner, Policing Policy in France, pp. 22–4. R. Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Chapters 4–5. C. Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community, particularly Chapters 5 and 7. T. Lobe, ‘US Police Assistance for the Third World’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 1975, p. 96. H. Smith, et al., Area Handbook for South Vietnam, Department of the Army Pamphlet 550–5, p. 412. D. Andradé, Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War, p. 154. PSD/USOM, Walton to Brent, 4 November 1963, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, Background Information/Vietnam 1961–63, folder marked ‘IPS#1/Policy, Programs/Vietnam/NP 9/63-12/63’, NACP. PSD/USOM, Walton to Gardiner, 12 May 1961, pp. 1, 5, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #10 through #10-1, Subversion, Insurgency and Intelligence, 1960, folder marked ‘IPS #10/Counter-Insurgency in Vietnam (photos), 1961–62’, NACP. PSD/USOM, Walton, memorandum of conversation with Mr Nguyen Van Y, Director-General, National Police, 14 November 1962, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, General Policy, Guidelines, and Background, 1961–1963, folder marked ‘IPS #1/General Policy, Programs/Vietnam/NP, 5/63-8/63’, NACP. NSC, Forrestal to Janow, 8 February 1963, p. 1, Hilsman Papers, Countries, Philippines–Vietnam, Box 3, folder marked ‘Vietnam 2/1/63-8/21/63’, JFKL. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support [MACV/CORDS], ‘National Police Force Levels’, 16 March 1970, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #12/Police Administration, 1970-1970, folder marked ‘IPS #12, NP Manpower, Folder I, ‘70’, NACP. J. Trullinger, Jr., Village at War: An Account of Revolution in Vietnam, pp. 85–90. PSD/USOM, Gross, memorandum of conversation with Tran Van Tu, Director Saigon Police, 15 November 1962, p. 2, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, General Policy, Guidelines, and Background, 1961–1963, folder marked ‘IPS #1/Background/Vietnam/Memos ‘62’, NACP. PSD/USOM, Walton, ‘National Police Plan for Vietnam’, March 1964, p. 24, RG 286, OPS, Vietnam Division, Subject File, IPS #12/Police Administration, 1955–1967, folder marked ‘IPS #12, NP Plan for Vietnam/Handbook’, NACP. DOD, Lansdale to McNamara, 17 January 1961, USVNR, vol. 11, p. 9. PSD/USOM, Queen to Lowe, 6 December 1961, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, General Policy, Guidelines, and Background, 1961–1963, folder marked ‘IPS #1/Programs/VN/NP 9/61-12/61’, NACP. R. Whitcomb, The American Approach to Foreign Affairs: An Uncertain Tradition, p. 72.

Notes 45

46 47 48

49

50 51 52 53

54

55

56 57 58 59

60 61

62 63 64 65

187

PSD/USOM, Forney to Walton, 17 July 1963, p. 2, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1961–1963, folder marked ‘IPS #1/General Policy, Programs/Vietnam/NP, 5/63-8/63’, NACP. R. Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam, Studies in International Security: 10, pp. 59–60. Andradé, Ashes to Ashes, p. 148. PSD/USOM, Walton to Gardiner, 12 May 1961, pp. 1, 5, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #10 through #10-1, Subversion, Insurgency and Intelligence, 1960, folder marked ‘IPS #10/Counter-Insurgency in Vietnam (photos), 1961–62’, NACP. The population figure is for 1950. ‘Population Statistics: Growth of the Population per Country in a Historical Perspective, including Administrative Divisions and Principal Towns’, online, available HTTP: (accessed 17 September 2004). R. Clutterbuck, The Long Long War: Counterinsurgency in Malaya and Vietnam, p. 72. Robert G.K. Thompson and Desmond Palmer, ‘Revolutionary Development and National Police Problems in South Vietnam: A Field Report’, D(L) No. 14611, p. 6. Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, vol. II, p. 134; and G. Kahin and J. Lewis, The United States and Vietnam, p. 138. The US population in the early 1960s was roughly fifteen times that of the Republic of Vietnam. PSD/USOM, Schmid to Lowe, 17 March 1961, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1/General Policy, Guidelines, and Background, folder marked ‘IPS #1/Programs/Vietnam/National Police 1/61-4/61’, NACP. PSD/USOM, Forney to Walton, 15 August 1963, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #10 through #10-1/Subversion, Insurgency and Intelligence, 1960–1965, folder marked ‘IPS #10-1/Intelligence/Vietnam (L-1 to 178) Folder II, 1963, 1964’, NACP. For example, see PSD/USOM, Walton to Gottlieb, 23 October 1962, p. 2, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, General Policy, Guidelines and Background, 1961–1963, folder marked ‘IPS #1/General Policy, Programs/Vietnam/NP, 1/63-4/63’, NACP. M. Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA’s Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong, p. 341. WH, Bagley to Taylor, 12 March 1962, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. II, pp. 216–19. Cao Van Vien and Dong Van Khuyen, Reflections on the Vietnam War, Indochina Monographs, pp. 37–9; and A. Joes, The War for South Vietnam, 1954–1975, p. 65. PSD/USOM, ‘Summary of Training Activities for 1962, from January 1st to November 30th’, p. 3, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #12-4/Training, 1960–1962, folder marked ‘IPS #12-4/Training/Vietnam ‘62’, NACP. USOM, Vietnam Operational Report, FY 1963–1964 (n.p., n.d.), pp. 34, 38. USOM/PSD, Walton to Gottlieb, 23 October 1962, p. 2, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #1, General Policy, Guidelines, and Background, 1961–63, folder marked ‘IPS#1/General Policy, Programs/ Vietnam/National Police 1/63-4/63’, NACP. USOM, Annual Report for Fiscal Year 1962, p. 70. R. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds, pp. 113–15. AID, ‘AID Public Safety Program’, n.d., p. 6, (See note II). C. Enloe, ‘Ethnicity and Militarization Factors Shaping the Roles of Police in Third World Nations’, in C.. Enloe and U. Semin-Panzer (eds), The Military, the Police, and Domestic Order: British and Third World Experiences, pp. 147–8; and E.

188

66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85

86 87 88 89

Notes Lefever, ‘U.S. Public Safety Assistance: An Assessment’, report prepared for the U.S. Agency for International Development under contract cds-3361 with the Brookings Institution, pp. 32–3. Report of the Police Mission to Malaya, Kuala Lumpur: Government Press, March 1950, p. 16. Brewer, et al., The Police, Public Order, and the State, p. 44 (emphasis in original). DOS, Hilsman to Robert Kennedy, 24 April 1962, pp. 1–3, Hilsman Papers, Countries, Philippines–Vietnam, Box 3, folder marked ‘Vietnam, 3/1/62-7/27/62’, JFKL. Ibid., p. 1. I. Horowitz, Ideology and Utopia in the United States, 1956–1976, p. 162. W. Kimball, ‘The Incredible Shrinking War: The Second World War, Not (Just) the Origins of the Cold War’, Diplomatic History 25, p. 359. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World, p. 156. For insightful recent treatments of this issue, see S. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America; D. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965, pp. 255–64. C. Cooper, The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam, p. 182. DOD, Lansdale to McNamara, 17 January 1961, USVNR, vol. 11, p. 9. Quoted in W. Gibbons, The US Government and the Vietnam War: Executive and Legislative Roles and Relationships, Part II: 1961–1964, p. 85. DOS, paper prepared by Vice President Johnson, , n.d., FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. I, p. 151. Letter from the Vietnam and US Special Financial Groups to Diem and Kennedy, 14 July 1961, in ibid., p. 222. G. Tanham, ‘Defeating Insurgency in South Vietnam: My Early Efforts’, in H. Neese and J. O’Donnell (eds), Prelude to Tragedy: Vietnam 1960–1965, Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2001, p. 175. DOS, embassy in Vietnam to DOS, 5 April 1963, FRUS, 1961–1963, vol. III, p. 208. Colby, Lost Victory, pp. 106–7. A.M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, p. 543. International Cooperation Administration [ICA], Ruffner to deputy administrator, 25 April 1962, p. 5, RG 286, OPS, Office of the Director, Numerical File 1956–1974, IPS 1–1 to 2–3, folder marked ‘General Reports and Statistics (Public Safety Summaries)’, NACP. Whitcomb, The American Approach, p. 71. The classic expression of this view can be found in Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, New York: Free Press, 1962. PSD/USOM, Gross to Walton, 24 July 1961, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #10 through #10-1/Subversion, Insurgency and Intelligence, 1960–1965, folder marked ‘IPS #10/CounterInsurgency in Vietnam (photos) 1961–1962’, NACP. PSD/USOM, Landgren to McCabe, 27 October 1961, attachment A, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Office of the Director, General Records, 1957–1974, C/3-8 SA and TA Funding Study-Nepal, folder marked ‘IPS #12-4/Training/Vietnam 1961’, NACP. E. Nadelmann, Cops Across Borders: The Internationalization of US Criminal Law Enforcement, p. 22. PRO, FO371/136164, DV1641/8, ‘Report on Visit of Police Adviser to Vietnam, 21st–27th November, 1958’, p. 5. Useful recent accounts of the unravelling of the relationship between the Kennedy administration and the Diem government can be found in R. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975, pp. 100–23; and D. Kaiser,

Notes

90 91

92

93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

189

American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson and the Origins of the Vietnam War, pp. 186–283. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World, p. 132; and M. Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy, particularly Chapter 4. WH, Komer to Maechling, 3 May 1962, p. 5, Working Files for Komer and Saunders for Near East and South Asia, NSF Open Boxes 413-414, folder marked ‘Counterinsurgency Police Program (White House Memoranda 5/61-10/63)’, JFKL; and R. Hilsman, ‘Internal War: The New Communist Tactic’, in T.N. Greene (ed.), The Guerrilla – and How to Fight Him: Selections from the Marine Corps Gazette, p. 24. PSD/USOM, Public Safety annex to Counter-Insurgency Plan for South Vietnam, 18 January 1961, p. 4, RG 286, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, IPS #10 through #10-1/Subversion, Insurgency and Intelligence, 1960–1965, folder marked ‘IPS #10/Counter-Insurgency in Vietnam (photos) 1961–1962’, NACP. A. Hills, Policing Africa: Internal Security and the Limits of Liberalization, p. 8. PSD/USOM, Walton to Brent, 4 November 1963, p. 1, RG 286, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, 1961–1963, folder marked ‘IPS #1/Policy, Programs/Vietnam/NP, 9/63-12/63’, NACP. Ibid., p. 1. PSD/USOM, letter from Bush to Engle, 3 December 1963, p. 2, RG 286, AID, OPS, Operations Division, East Asia Branch, Vietnam, 1961–1963, folder marked ‘IPS #1/Policy, Programs/Vietnam/NP, 9/63-12/63’, NACP. C. Cooper, et al., The American Experience with Pacification in Vietnam, Vol. II, Elements of Pacification, p. 82. PSD/USOM, Walton, ‘National Police Plan’ March 1964, p. 16. AID, The Other War in Vietnam: A Progress Report (Washington: AID, 1966), p. 27. WH, Leonhart to Komer, 31 May 1966, p. 5, document no. 2369, DDRS (July–August 1997).

Conclusion 1 2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

J. Marks, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control, p. 9. W. Rosenau, ‘The Warriors of Academe’, Inquiry, 15 February 1982, p. 13. International Cooperation Administration, S. Andrews, ‘Case Report Nine: Michigan State University – South Vietnam Contract’, n.d. [1960], p. 113, Record Group 286, Agency for International Development, Office of Public Safety, Vietnam Division, Subject File, ‘IPS #2-3/Program Surveys’, folder marked ‘Vietnam – MSU Report ‘54’, NACP. L. Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam, p. 30. W.W. Rostow, ‘Guerrilla Warfare in Underdeveloped Areas’, in T.N. Greene (ed.), The Guerrilla – and How to Fight Him: Selections from the Marine Corps Gazette, p. 56. R. Neibuhr, The Irony of American History, New York: Scribner, 1952, p. 71. R. Bruce, ‘US Training of International Security Forces and the Claim of Reform: Lessons from the Past’, Les Cahiers de l’Observatoire des Relations Internationales dans l’Hémisphère Sud, Cahier No. 2, n.d., online, available HTTP: < http:// www.upmf-grenoble.fr/orihs/cahiers/2/bruce.htm> (accessed 20 September 2004). Quoted in S. Karnow, Vietnam: A History, 2nd edn, p. 253. M. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952, p. 19. MSUG, Smuckler, ‘Report on the MSU-Vietnam Project’, April 1966, pp. 7–8, MSU, Vietnam Project, Box 919, folder 3, MSUAHC. D. Rusk, ‘The Stake in Viet-Nam’, Department of State Bulletin XLVII, May 13, 1963, p. 730.

190 12 13 14 15 16

17

Notes J. B Bell, Dragonwars: Armed Struggle and the Conventions of Modern War, pp. 290–91. R. Scigliano, South Vietnam, pp. 158, 206. R. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds, pp. 279. For more on the US strategy, see T. Scoville, Reorganizing for Pacification Support, Washington: US Army Center of Military History, 1982. Mark Magnier and Sonni Efron, ‘Arrested Development on Iraqi Police Force’, Los Angeles Times, 31 March 2004, p. 1. Ibid., p. 1. For an analysis of the failure of US internal security assistance to Iraq, see R. M. Perito, ‘The Coalition Provisional Authority’s Experience With Public Security in Iraq: Lessons Identified’, United States Institute of Peace, Special Report 137, April 2005 J. Gray, ‘History Bites Back’, New Statesman, 5 July 2004 (on-line edition).

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Index

academic freedom, Eisenhower warning on 87, 140–1 advice and politics, Smuckler on 143 Afghanistan; propaganda operations 21; security training programs 20, 25 Agency for International Development (AID) 88, 93; as counter-insurgency tool 89; and economic development 141–2; and internal security assistance 93–4; Johnson Committee on 94; Komer and 93–6; Maechling and 95; and police roles 128–9; and police training program 94–6 AID see Agency for International Development (AID) agrovilles program 108 Alliance for Progress, nation-building initiative 89 allies, security agreements with 11 American Friends of Vietnam, Kennedy and 102 Americanization 24, 91–2, 98, 124, 131–2; universalism 130–5, 142–3, 145 Amory, Robert, on counter-insurgency 90 Arbenz, Jacobo, CIA operations against 21–2 Argentina, FBI and Nazi subversives 20 Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) 48; absorption of paramilitary 105–7; augmentation 105; and Civil Guard 75; counter-guerrilla training not implemented 105–6; indoctrination activities 48; organization issues 107–8; Taylor–Rostow report on 104; Thompson plans for 112 Aron, Raymond, on East–West relations 85 ARVN see Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) authority, Maechling on 97

Ball, George, on modernization theory 87 ‘Banana Wars’ 14–16 Bao An see Civil Guard Bao Dai 29; appoints Diem prime minister 30; and call for elections 30; deposed 32 Batista, Fulgencio 22 Bayley, David H., on reforms export 99 Bell, J. Bowyer, on local conditions 64 Berlin crisis 22; Kennedy and 113 Binh Xuyen sect 31–3; and Sûreté 52 Blaufarb, Douglas, on military strategy 102 Bolivia; security programs 20; USIA and 22 Bowles, Chester A., on ‘internal security’ 88 Bramshill Police College, training at 21 Brazil: 1290–d Working Group and 19; FBI and Nazi subversives 20 Bremer, L. Paul, and Iraqi security forces 145 Brewer, John D., on police militarization 129–30 British Advisory Mission in South Vietnam (BRIAM) 101, 109–13; US attitude to 110–11, 113; see also Thompson, Robert Briggs, Sir Harold, counter-insurgency strategy 109 Britain; call for Vietnam elections 29–30; domestic security organizations 124; Malaya counter-insurgency strategy 109; on US counter-insurgency failures 110; police decentralized 124; technical assistance to security programs 20–1; Washington supports additional involvement 132; see also Thompson, Robert

Index 213 Browne, Stephen, on ICA 14 Buddhists, violent repression of 113 Bundy, McGeorge, national security advisor 82; and AID 93 bureaucratic conflict 138–9; Halperin on 118; Williams on 138 Burma, law enforcement assistance 17 California Institute of Technology, defense contractor 139 Cambodia; British police training 20; call for Vietnam elections 29–30; CPD and 18; propaganda operations 21; security programs 20 Cao Dai sect 31–3 Caribbean, US-commanded internal security forces 15 Castro, Fidel, Kennedy plots against 81 Catton, Philip E., on Strategic Hamlet Program 107 Central America, Curti and Birr on law in 16 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); and Arbenz 21–2; and civil police 122; and counter-subversion training 92; and Cuba 82; law enforcement assistance 17; and MSUG 122; operations, present secrecy over 56; and SAVAK 92, 122; and Service des Études Politiques, Économiques et Sociales (SEPES) 122; and VBI 55–7, 122 centralization, law enforcement 92 China: aid to DRV 102; call for Vietnam elections 29–30; influence growth 22; Sino–Soviet relations, deterioration 12 CIA see Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) CIP see Counterinsurgency Plan (CIP) ‘civic action teams’, Hilsman and 114 Civil Guard (Bao An) 39; and 1960 coup 66; augmentation 105; Britain training 110; Collins and 61, 62; conflict over 60–76; controversy 68–71; Durbrow and 69, 70; inadequacies 116–18; Lansdale on 63; McGarr and 74; military aid to 74–5; and North Vietnam threat 66–7, 68–9; Quang Trung training centre 44; resources 62–3, 68–71, 74–5; as rural police system 62–3; Schwarz on 64; Taylor–Rostow report on 104; US army model 67; US assistance origins 61–2; US police model 64; Williams and 67, 69–71, 73–4

Civil Police Division (CPD) 18, 62 civil servants, MSU to train 36 civilian police see police civilian/military advisors conflict 57–9 civilian/military power imbalance 138 Clifford, J. Garry, on foreign policy conflict 120 Colby, William: and BRIAM 110; on CIA, and VBI 122; on Vietnamese resistance to US advice 43 Collins, J. Lawton: and Civil Guard 61, 62; on Vietnam sects 31; sent to Saigon 30–1 colonialism: British Malaya 20–1, 109, 142; and Civil Guard 61, 63–4; French 38; Odom on 64 constabularies 14–16; in Caribbean 15; South East Asia 18–19; see also police Costa Rica, military assistance spending 93 counter-insurgency operations 47, 48–9; Amory on 90; civilian agencies and 89–90; criminalization effect 112–13; disagreements over 105–6; failures, Hohler on 110; Kennedy administration and 83–4; Lansdale and 35; lessons of past 96–7; McNamara and 106; Maechling and 84; and modernization theory 87–90, 96; policies 87–8; Rusk and 88, 90; strategy, Briggs on 109; training, McGarr and 106 Counterinsurgency Plan (CIP) 74; Diem and 107–8; MAAG and 105 counter-subversive training 20–2 Cuba: Batista regime ends 22; Bay of Pigs fiasco 88, 103, 104; Kennedy and 79, 81–3, 113; post Spanish–American War 15 Cuban guard 15 Curti, Merle, and Kendall Birr, on law in Central America 16 Decker, George H.: and Special Forces 89; on handling guerrillas 74 Delta Plan (Thompson) 112, 113 Democratic Party, and defeat of Chiang Kai-shek 103 Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV): China aid to 22, 102; Ho Chi Minh and partitioning 29–30; intensifies struggle 102–4; MAAG focus on 138; National Liberation Front (NLF) (gains 102; unaffected by police 120); peaceful

214

Index

strategies failure 49–50; People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) 29 (control of villages 128; Chinese assistance to 22; development 33; Williams on 34, 35); People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) (named Viet Cong by Diem 48; SDC infiltration 57; and Strategic Hamlets 111–15, 116; superior to paramilitary forces 128) Department of Defense (DOD): internal security assistance programs 92–3; military assistance role 13; and VNA 34; see also military ... developing countries: issues, Komer on 83; modernization theory 77–8, 85–7; superpowers and 11–12; universalism 130, 142, 145; see also nation-building dictatorships, support for 23–4 Diem, Ngo Dinh 22: and BRIAM 109, 110, 111–13; career (Bao Dai appoints prime minister 30; becomes president 28, 32; high water mark 47–9; Kennedy abandons 133; removed by coup 116); and Civil Guard 60, 62, 65–6, 68–71; and Counterinsurgency Plan (CIP) 107–8; French antipathy to 32; and police 40–1, 124–5, 143; and populace 42, 44, 113–15, 125, 131, 143; and security forces 41, 47, 48–9. 107–8; and sects 31; and Self-Defense Corps (SDC) 41–3, 116–18; and Strategic Hamlet Program 107–8, 115; and Sûreté 52–5; and USA (advisor proliferation 43, 132; attitude to US 41, 43, 60, 75; Eisenhower on 28; Fishel and 36; Kennedy and 102–4; legitimacy unquestioned 133–5; strategic importance 37, 49; US support 28, 30, 33–5; US evaluation of 28, 31, 32–3; Williams and 69) Dienbienphu, French defeat 29 dissidents, repression 113 Dominican Republic, Guardia Nacional 15 Draper Committee 83–4 DRV see Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) Dulles, Allen 9, 22; on Soviet influence 22 Dulles, John Foster: on nuclear response 79; opposes Vietnam elections 29–30; and resource conservation 10–11; on security coordination 23 Durbrow, Elbridge: and Civil Guard 69, 70; on SDC 57

East–West relations: Aron on 85; Hannah on 36–7; Hershberg on 99 Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), abolition 13 Eisenhower, Dwight D.: on Diem 28; on MSP 23; on support for dictatorships 24; warning on academic freedom 87, 140–1 Eisenhower administration: and Civil Guard 60; Cold War security strategies 26–7; counter-subversive campaign inception 9–10, 12; foreign assistance 12–14; foreign policy objectives 13; and MSUG 139–40; New Look policy 10–11; opposes Vietnam elections 29–30; resource conservation 10–11 elections: Bao Dai and call for 30; Dulles opposes 29–30 England see Britain Engle, Byron; on ICA 26; and OPS 95 Ernst, John, on MSU activities 29 Ethiopia, security training failures 25 Fall, Bernard B., on Diem and populace 42 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): model for VBI 55; and Nazi subversives 20 Fishel, Wesley, and Diem 36 flexible response strategy 79 foreign aid, as counter-insurgency tool 89 foreign policy conflict, Clifford on 120 Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) 13, 18 fortification systems, rural 107–8 France: antipathy to Diem 32; colonial security forces 38–9; defeat at Dienbienphu 29; Gendarmerie training 20; and Indochina 11; and nationalism 38–9; technical assistance to security programs 20–1; and Vietnam partitioning 29–30; VNA training 30 Freedman, Lawrence, on theoreticians 100 Gaddis, John Lewis, on coexistence 10 Garde Civile de Cochinchine 38 Garde Indigène de l’Indochine 38 Garde Urbaine 38 Gardiner, Arthur Z.: on police problems 123; Lansdale on 126 Gendarmerie (Hien Binh) 20, 38, 39–40 Geneva conference, call for Vietnam elections 29–30; not implemented 49 Geographically Phased National Level Operation Plan 107–8

Index 215 Goldwater, Barry, pressure on Kennedy 103 government–university partnerships, Eisenhower on 87 Gray, John, on US attitudes 145 Greece: 1290–d Working Group on 20; counter-insurgency successes 97; ICA and forensic laboratories 20; law enforcement assistance 17; paramilitary training 21; propaganda operations 21 Guatemala: CIA psychological operations 21–2; ICA and forensic laboratories 20 guerrillas: Decker on handling 74; ignored by MAAG 35; underestimated 74–5; see also counter-insurgency Haiti, constabularies 15 Halperin, Morton H., on bureaucratic politics 118 Hamilton, Fowler, and Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) 90 Haney, Albert R., on support for dictatorships 24 Hannah, John A.: on education and Cold War 36–7; and MSUG/CIA collaboration 56 Hanoi see Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) Harkins, Paul D.: and MACV 105; opposed police-oriented security 126; on Strategic Hamlet Program 115 Harriman, W. Averell, on neutralizing Vietnam 104 ‘hearts and minds’ strategy 111–13, 113–15 Hershberg, James G., on east/west tensions 99 Hills, Alice, on policing 98 Hilsman, Roger, director State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research 82; counter-insurgency policies 87–8; ‘hearts and minds’ strategy 113–15; modernization theory 141; on police role expansion 130; strategic plan 114–15; universalistic viewpoint 130 Ho Chi Minh, and Vietnam partitioning 29–30 Hoa Hao sect 31–3 Hogan, Michael J., on Marshall Plan, and scientific management 143 Hohler, Henry, on US counter-insurgency failures 110

Home, Alec Douglas, on Thompson 110 Hoover, Herbert C., on Vietnam police 35 Horowitz, Irving Louis, on liberalism 131 Hoyt, Howard W., on police reform 51 human resources, failure to prioritize 120–1 Hungary, Soviet invasion 12 Hunt, Michael H., on managerialism 96 ICA see International Cooperation Administration (ICA) Indonesia: 1290–d Working Group on 20; CPD and 18; law enforcement assistance 17; security programs 20 institution-building 60, 114 insurgency see counter-insurgency intelligence agencies, proliferation 43, 112 inter-agency struggles 46 Interagency Committee on Police Assistance Programs... (Johnson Committee) 94 internal security assistance programs 16–18, 25–6, 49, 88; and nationbuilding 37–9 International Association of Chiefs of Police, US courses 17 International Cooperation Administration (ICA) 13–14; Browne on 14; and Civil Guard 70; Engle and 26; focus on economic development 141–2; and forensic laboratories 20; on internal security 37–8; and MSUG 44–6, 72; and paramilitary assistance 26; and police roles 128–9; on support for dictatorships 24; see also Public Safety Division (PSD) Iran: 1290–d Working Group on 20; CPD and 18; Imperial Gendarmerie 16–17; military assistance spending 93; paramilitary training 21; propaganda operations 21; SAVAK CIA training 92, 122; security programs 20 Iraq: 1290–d Working Group on 20; propaganda operations 21; security forces, Bremer and 145; security training failures 25; Vietnam as model for 144–5 Japan, police system 16 John Birch Society, pressure on Kennedy 103 Johns Hopkins University, defense contractor 139 Johnson, Lyndon B., Saigon visit 105

216

Index

Johnson administration: and police reform 135; urges social/economic improvements 131; and Revolutionary Development Cadre 43 Johnson, U. Alexis, on AID 93 Johnson Committee 94 Jordan, John M., on managerialism 96 Karnow, Stanley, on US influence on Diem 60 Kaysen, Carl, and NSC 87 Kennan, George F., on Japan police system 16 Kennedy, John F.: and American Friends of Vietnam 102; and communism 79–81, 103; and Cuba 79, 81–3; and Eisenhower policies 77, 78, 79–81; and guerrilla warfare 83–4; as leader 78–9; and Strategic Hamlet Program 43; and Third World 79–81 Kennedy administration: and AID 93–6; Counterinsurgency Plan (CIP) 74, 77–8, 105, 107–8; and Cuba 81, 82; and Diem regime 102–4; failure to understand local situation 118–19; and liberalism 131; and managerialism 95–6; and modernization theory 100; and police roles 128–9; and social science 140–2; and Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) 90; and Strategic Hamlet Program 101; and Thompson 113 Kennedy, Robert F.: and Castro 81; and Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) 90 Keynes, John Maynard, on enslavement to theory 100 Khrushchev, Nikita; Kennedy and 103, 104; on support for wars of national liberation 81 Komer, Robert W.: and AID 93–6; on ICA 141–2; and lessons of past 96–7; and managerialism 96; and police role strengthening 90–2; on program finance 26; and Third World issues 83 Korea: 1290–d Working Group on 20; security programs 20 Korean war, communist cooperation 12 Krepinevich, Andrew F. Jr., on MAAG 34–5 Lansdale, Edward: on Civil Guard 63; and counter-insurgency 35; on Gardiner 126; urges liberalism on Vietnam 131

Laos: 1290–d Working Group on 19–20; British police training 21; call for Vietnam elections 29–30; CPD and 18; effect on aid to Thailand 121–2; neutralization 104; security programs 20; USIA and 22 law enforcement see police law enforcement institutions, Americanization 24, 91–2, 98, 124, 131–2 Lebanon, emergency assistance 25 Lefever, Ernest, on internal security assistance programs 26 Leffler, Melvyn P., on Truman’s policies 17 Lemnitzer, Lyman L., on police counterguerrilla efforts 106 Liberia, CPD and 18 Libya, security training failures 25 ‘limited partnership’ proposals 104 Lobe, Thomas, on Engle and OPS 95 local conditions: Bell on 64; ignored 43, 86, 97–9; failure to understand 118–19 MAAG see Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) MacArthur, Douglas, and Japan police system 16 Macmillan, Harold, and ‘special relationship’ 110 MACV see Military Assistance Advisory Command (MACV) Maechling, Charles Jr.; on authority 97; and counter-insurgency program 84; on Kennedy administration and AID 95 Malaya: British police training 20–1; counter-insurgency successes 97, 109; inappropriate model for Vietnam 142; ‘New Villages’ strategy 109; police role 129 Malenkov, Georgi, on peaceful coexistence 10 managerialism 96 Mansfield, Mike: urges US-style politics on Diem 131; on Vietnam sects 31 Mao Zedong, aid to DRV 102 Marenin, Otwin, on professional police model 98 Marks, John, on military/universities links 139 Marshall Plan 13: and managerialism 96, 143 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 87, 139

Index 217 McCone, John, and Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) 90 McGarr, Lionel C.; and BRIAM 110–11, 113; and Civil Guard 74; and counterguerrilla training 106; and security forces organization 107–8 McGhee, George C., on assistance to pivotal countries 16–17 McMahon, Robert J., on Soviet model 11 McNamara, Robert S.; and counterguerrilla efforts 106; on Kennedy and Cuba 82; on lack of understanding 46; and managerialism 96; Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) 90; Wills on 96 Michigan State University (MSU) 21, 29, 35–7, 87 Michigan State University Group (MSUG) 37, 39; and CIA 55–7; and Civil Guard 62–3, 68–71; and equipment 44; and SDC 42; and Sûreté 59; ends contract 72–3, 75–6; expat problems 50–1; ICA criticism 44–6, 72; ignoring local conditions 64; instructor training 44–5; nation-building focus 44; on power sources and US assistance 43; police reform 44–6, 50–5, 58, 60; rural police vision 138, 143; unique position 139–40 military/civilian advisors, tension between 126 military strategy, Blaufarb on 102 military/universities links 139–40 Military Assistance Advisory Command (MACV) 105; and Civil Guard and SDC 105–7; and resource allocation 127; Harkins and 105; Kennedy administration, policy conflict 138–9; required Vietnamese police guards 125–6; support for Strategic Hamlet Program 115 Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) 31; becomes Military Assistance Advisory Command (MACV) 105; bureaucratic power 138; and Civil Guard 66–71, 73–6; CounterInsurgency Plan (CIP) 105; develops VNA as offensive force 34–5; focus on DRV threat 138; Krepinevich on 34–5; and North Vietnam perceived threat 66–7; and SDC 42, 57–9; Taylor–Rostow report on 104 military–industrial complex, Eisenhower on 87, 140 modernization theory 77–8, 85–7, 141; and managerialism 96; and police

advisors 143; and Strategic Hamlet Program 118–19; Hilsman and 141; implementation 87–90 Morse, Wayne, on support for dictatorships 24 MSU see Michigan State University (MSU) MSUG see Michigan State University Group (MSUG) municipal police (Canh Sat) 39, 120–35; see also police Mutual Security Agency (MSA) 13 Mutual Security Program (MSP) 13; criticised 23; military/economic components 89; reorganization 14–15 nation-building 14–16; vs counterinsurgency 98–9; and modernization theory 141; Schulzinger on 14; universalism 130, 142, 145; US model 37–9 National Liberation Front (NLF): gains 102; unaffected by police 120 National Police Academy, Saigon 44 National Police Field Force (NPFF) 128 National Police organization, Thompson on 112, 123–4 National Security Action Memoranda (NSAM) 83; NSAM 111 105; NSAM 114 92; NSAM 162 92; NSAM 177 94–6 National Security Council (NSC) 9; Kaysen and 87; NSC 1290–d 18–23, 28; New Look policy 10–11; and VNA development 33–4 nationalism: communism and 11–12; French policies and 38–9 Neibuhr, Reinhold, on universalism 142 New Frontier policy 78; and counterinsurgency 83, 90; lack of realism 100 New Look policy 10–11; and NSC action 1290–d 18–21; weaknesses 22–3 Nguyen Ngoc Le, and Sûreté 52 Nhu, Ngo Dinh; American animosity to 116; Nhan-vi [personalism] philosophy 108; and power retention 43; and Strategic Hamlet Program 107, 108; view of US 75 Nicaragua, military assistance spending 93 Nolting, Frederick, on institution-building 114 non-military solutions, Thompson on 111–13 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 11

218

Index

North Vietnam see Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) NSC see National Security Council (NSC) nuclear response, Dulles on 79 O’Daniel, John W.: on SDC 57; on Vietnam sects 31; and VNA as offensive force 34 Oakeshott, Michael, on modernization theory 86 Odom, William E., on colonialism 64 Office of Public Safety (OPS), formerly PSD 26; Engle and 95; police assistance programs 94–6 Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) 11, 48 Overseas Internal Defense Policy (OIDP) 88–9 Overseas Internal Security Program (OISP) 23–6; CIA and 56 Packenham, Robert A., on modernization theory 86 Panama, military assistance spending 93 paramilitary forces: ARVN absorption 105–7; expectations 101–2; ICA and assistance 26; MSU to train 36; PLAF superior to 128; poor US support of 117–19; US National Guard as model 92 Peace Corps, nation-building initiative 89 peaceful coexistence, Malenkov on 10 Pennsylvania State Mounted Police, as model 15 People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) 29; control of villages 128; Chinese assistance to 22; development 33; Williams on 34, 35 People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF): named Viet Cong by Diem 48; SDC infiltration 57; and Strategic Hamlets 111–15, 116; superior to paramilitary forces 128 Phan Huy Quat, US and 32 Philipinnes: counter-insurgency successes 97; law enforcement assistance 17; military assistance spending 93; MSU and 36; paramilitary training 21; security programs 20 Philippines Police Constabulary, and Hukbalahap movement 17 pivotal countries 16–17 police: aid 121–2; Americanization 24, 91–2, 98, 124, 131–2; (universalism

130–5, 142–3, 145; BRIAM and 101, 109–13; control structure 39–40; postDiem 135; recruitment problems 125, 126–7; reorganization (ARVN and 105–7; expansion 125–7; militarization 128–30; plans 39–43, 50–5, 84, 123–5; reform failure 120–30; Reinhardt and 35, 40, 42); roles 90–2, 106, 109 (conflict with military 128–30, 135–6; expansion 130; failure to differentiate 121); training 36 (advisors, suitability 97–9; British 20–1, 101, 109–13; failure 121, 123; French Gendarmerie training 20; not evaluated 133; trainers, recruitment problems, 25–6; see also MSU; MSUG; PSD); see also paramilitary forces; Sûreté police-oriented security 126 policing, political nature of 98–9, 121, 134–5, 143 Policy Planning Council: on guerrilla warfare 83; on insurgency and dissent 90–1 politics, US-style, Mansfield on 131 Pool, Ithiel de Sola 87 President’s Committee to Study the United States Military Assistance Program 83–4 professional police model, Marenin on 98 program finance, Komer on 26 propaganda operations, Cold War 21–2 Public Safety Division (PSD) [of ICA] 21; advisors concentrate on technical issues 133–4; advisors’ contempt for military advisors 126; becomes Office of Public Safety 26; on causes of insurgency 126; guerrilla numbers estimate 127; militarizes police 128; and National Police Field Force (NPFF) 128; and police assistance 122, 123–9; on training failures 25 psychological operations, Cold War 21–2 Quang Trung training centre 44 Rabe, Stephen G., on Kennedy and Cuba 82 reforms export, Bayley on 99 refugees, Catholic 33 Reinhardt, G. Frederick, and police 35, 40, 42 resources: conservation, Dulles on 10–11; competition for 126–7 Revolutionary Development Cadre 43

Index 219 Rostow, Walt W.; counter-insurgency policies 87–8; modernization theory 85–6, 141; and State Department Policy Planning Council 82–3 Rusk, Dean, secretary of state 82; on counter-insurgency 88, 90; and Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) 90; on Strategic Hamlet Program 115–16 Russia see Soviet Union Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr; on Kennedy and Cuba 81; modernization theory 141 Schulzinger, Robert D., on nation-building 14 Schwarz, Benjamin C., on Civil Guard 64 Schwarzkopf, H. Norman, and Iran Gendarmerie 17 Scigliano, Robert; and Guy H. Fox, on present secrecy over CIA operations 56; on centralization by Diem 48 sects, Vietnam 31–3 security forces: South East Asia 18–19; and modernization theory 141; organization issues 107–8 Self-Defense Corps (SDC): disagreement over 47, 57–8; formed by Diem 41–3; inadequacies 116–18; Taylor–Rostow report on 104; units, ecclesiastical leadership 115; US support 42–3; Viet Cong infiltration 57; Williams and 57–8 Service des Études Politiques, Économiques et Sociales (SEPES) 43 Short, Anthony: on South Vietnam dependence 59; on Strategic Hamlet Program implementation 116 Sino–Soviet relations, deterioration 12 Small Wars Manual (US Marine Corps) 15 Smith, R.B., on US model of national development 37 Smith, Walter Bedell, on Diem 31 Smuckler, Ralph: on advice and politics 143; on late 50s aid 51; on MSUG/CIA arrangements 56 social science see modernization theory Somalia, British police assistance 110 Sorensen, Theodore C., on Kennedy and Castro 81 South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) 11, 30 South Korea; CPD and 18; MSU and 36 South Vietnam; dependence, Short on 59; Eisenhower administration attitude 30; military assistance spending 93; as

model for Iraq 144–5; post Dienbienphu 28; US commitment origins 29–31; and US global power 103; see also Diem and specific organisations Soviet Union: call for Vietnam elections 29–30; and Cuba 81, 82; Hungary invasion 12; influence 22; model, McMahon on 11; post-Stalin 10, 11 Spanish–American War 15 ‘special relationship’ (US/UK) 110 Special Branch [UK], and intelligencegathering 109–10 Special Forces 89 Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) 90 Sputnik, reactions to 22 Staley, Eugene, urges social/economic improvements 131 Stalin, Josef, death 10 Stassen, Harold, on countering subversion 14 State Department Policy Planning Council, Rostow and 82–3 Strategic Hamlet Program 42–3, 107–8; BRIAM and 111–13; failure 116–18; Hilsman and 113–15; implementation 115–16 Strauss, Leo, on modernization theory 86 subversion: Stassen on 14; never defined 12; see also counter-insurgency superpowers and developing world 10–12 Sûreté (Cong An) 38, 39, 40; MSUG restructure proposals 52–5; policy clashes 47; reform 51–4; renamed Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation (VBI) 55; see also police Syria, 1290–d Working Group on 19, 20 Taiwan, MSU and 36 Taiwan Strait crisis 22 Tanham, George K., on attempted Americanization 131–2 Taylor, Maxwell D., chairman of joint chiefs of staff 82; and Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) 90 Taylor–Rostow mission, report 104–5 Thailand: law enforcement assistance 17; police assistance 121; security programs 20 Thayer, Carlyle A., on Vietnam sects 31 theoreticians, Freedman on 100 Third World see developing countries Thompson, Robert: and BRIAM 101; Diem and 109, 110; and national police

220

Index

system 123–4; and strategic hamlets 111–13, 116; Home on 110; Kennedy and 113, 132; on non-military solutions 111–13; on police devalued by ARVN prestige 126; on police inadequate numbers 127 Tran LeXuah (wife of Nhu), American animosity to 116 ‘triumph of technique’, Whitcomb on 132 Truman administration: and Cold War 10; and Vietnam involvement 29; foreign policy 13, 17–18; policies, Leffler on 17 Turkey: ICA and forensic laboratories 20; law enforcement assistance 17 U-2 spy plane crisis 22 underdeveloped areas see developing countries understanding failure, McNamara on 46 United Kingdom see Britain United States see specific administrations and agencies United States Information Agency (USIA) 21–2, 88 United States Marine Corps, in Caribbean 15 United States military: and counterguerrilla training 105–6; inappropriate for Vietnam role 117–19; influence on foreign policy 126; law enforcement assistance 17 United States National guard as paramilitary model 92 United States Operations Mission (USOM) 40; and Civil Guard 62, 68–71 universalism 130–5, 142–3, 145 universities: and national security 139–40; counterinsurgency research 36–7 Uruguay, FBI and Nazi subversives 20

Viet Cong/Viet Minh see National Liberation Front (NLF); People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN); People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) Vietnam see Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV); South Vietnam Vietnam Sects 31–3 Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation (VBI): Britain training for Diem 110; criminal investigations 122; formerly Sûreté 55–7; reform 120–5 Vietnamese National Army (VNA): Civil Guard adjunct to 39; French training 30; as internal security force 33–4; as offensive force 34; and sects 31–2; Williams and 34 village guards (Tu Ve Huong Thon) 39 village militias 41–3 villages: lack of police 39; propaganda struggle 48–9; see also Strategic Hamlets Walton, Frank, on police problems 123, 125, 127 Whitcomb, Roger S., on ‘triumph of technique’ 132 Williams, Samuel T.: and Civil Guard 67, 69–71, 73–4; and Diem 69; on internal security 49, 126; power 138; and SDC 57–8; on Viet Minh 34, 35; and VNA 34 Wills, Gary, on McNamara 96 Wilson, O.W.: on Anglo-Saxon police concepts 24; Police Administration 98

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