Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (Forbidden Bookshelf) by Ralph W. McGehee

Author:Ralph W. McGehee [McGehee, Ralph W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781497689398
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

rumors. Such crimes were punishable by death. Bernard Fall, in his book Last Reflections

on a War, observed: “On May 6, 1959, the Diem regime passed Law 10/59, which

provided for a system of drumhead courts capable of handing out death sentences for even

trivial offenses. Thus all South Vietnamese opposition—whether Communist or not—had

to become subversive, and did.… ‘Four persons out of five became suspects and liable to

be imprisoned if not executed.’” 19

In reaction to Diem’s campaign of death against his own people, the southern branch of

the Communist Party pressured North Vietnam into supporting their armed revolution.

Contrary to the impression generated by Agency propaganda, the war at this stage was not

an “invasion from the North” but a local resistance to the despotic Diem regime.

Numerous authorities have commented on this subject, and captured Communist

documents also reveal this to be true. 20

While the Agency was creating all of those “security” programs, it also had to estimate

the strength of the communist forces. A captured Communist Party document containing

the history of the party stated that its size in the South before Geneva was 60,000 party

members (not including members of the mass organizations) with party members in nearly

every village except those controlled by the religious sects and ethnic minorities. 21 The document said that at that time those in the South had the twofold mission of reorganizing

the mass-based organizations and developing military units in absolute secrecy. Beginning

with 15,000 dedicated hard-core party members—aided in their organizational efforts by

Diem’s ruthless oppression—the party began to rebuild itself from the ground up. Over the

years it created an interwoven political, civilian, and military structure and honed it into a

responsive revolutionary weapon. At the hamlet level nearly every man, woman, and child

was recruited into some organization and motivated to fight Diem and his American

backers.

By late 1963 the People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP) and its National Liberation Front

of South Vietnam (NLF) had declared that in their 30 different organizations they had a

membership of 7 million, with the largest front groups being the Farmers’ Liberation

Association with 1.8 million members and the Women’s Liberation Association with 1.2

million. These figures were undoubtedly inflated, but U.S. intelligence estimates ignored

their existence. To understand the way U.S. intelligence estimated communist strength in

South Vietnam at the time, it is useful to review the following chart, included in the

Pentagon Papers and prepared by the RAND Corporation:

VIET CONG STRENGTH

1954 – 1964

(rounded to nearest thousand)

Guerrillas,

Self-Defense

Main &

Units, Secret

Year

Local Forces

Self-

Source

(Regulars)

Defense

Units

(Irregulars)

NSC Briefing, 16 March 1956. Open

sources give 5-10,000. Weekly Intelligence

1955*

10,000

NA

Digest, 18 May 1956, suggests 10,000

number should be revised to 6-8,000.

1956*

5,000-7,500

NA

Weekly Intelligence Digest, 10 August 1956.

Weekly Intelligence Digest, 30 May 1958;

1957*

2,000

1,000-2,000

Weekly Intelligence Digest, 18 July 1958.

Weekly Intelligence Digest, 19 December

1958*

April–2,000

NA

1958.

1959*

2,000

NA

NIE 63-59, 26 May 1959.

April–4,000

3,000 (SNIE

Weekly Intelligence Digest, 17 February

1960*

Sept.–7,000

63.1-60)

1961. SNIE 63.1-60, 3-5,000 regulars.

Dec–10,000

June–15,000

Weekly Intelligence Digest, 13 October

Sept.–

1961*

NA

1961; Weekly Intelligence Digest, 20

16,000-

October 1961.

17,000

Current Intelligence Weekly Summary, OCI

1962*

23,000

NA

2 November 1962.

1963*

June–25,000

NA

Southeast Asia Military

Fact Book, DIA/JCS. Based on MACV data.

1964**

June–31,000

72,000

Dec–34,000

Data not retroactively adjusted.

*Estimate of Viet Cong strength for this period is subject to great uncertainty. The numbers here should be treated as order of magnitude.

**Add approximately 40,000 in the Viet Cong “infrastructure.” The infrastructure is defined as the PRP, PRP Central Committee, and the NLF. See MACV, Monthly Order of Battle Summaries, for a discussion. Also add 23-25,000 in Administrative Service, i.e., staff and technical service units subordinate to various headquarters. 22

The chart uses the term Viet Cong as the intelligence community’s rather imprecise name

for the Vietnamese communist movement in the South. The figures are based on both

Agency and military estimates of the number of communists in the country, but those

sourced to NIEs (National Intelligence Estimates), SNIEs (Special National Intelligence

Estimates), and the Current Intelligence Weekly Summary of OCI (Office of Current

Intelligence) most closely reflect the Agency’s input.

The chart reveals a total lack of appreciation of the size of the movement. In 1954

French intelligence estimated that the communists controlled up to 90 percent of rural

South Vietnam outside of the sect domains.23 Yet, until 1964 U.S. intelligence only twice recorded any militia, guerrilla, or other irregular forces. Most glaringly, even after the

communists announced the existence of the NLF and its multi-million-person structure,

the estimates failed to include a single member of the farmers’, the women’s, or the youth

groups. Until 1964 the chart also omits any reference to Communist Party members—the

key element in the revolution. Those omissions reveal a lack of understanding of

revolutionary methods and forces.

The Agency’s erroneous assessment of the communist movement is best exemplified by

a speech Colby gave in Vietnam. In his book, Honorable Men, he talks of a briefing he

gave to American civilian and military chiefs in Vietnam in 1968: “To that audience I set

forth something different from the usual rundown of Communist main- and local-force

battalions.… I outlined instead the structure and functions of the Lao Dong Party and its

southern section, named the People’s Revolutionary Party, the National Liberation Front,

the Provisional Government of South Vietnam, the Liberation Committees and National

Alliance of Democratic Forces, which had made post-Tet [1968] appearances. [Emphasis

added.] I pointed out that these had failed to attract much popular support [emphasis

added] but they nevertheless were the phantom political skeleton that the Communists

would use in any negotiation for a peace treaty or cease-fire.” 24

After the war the U.S. government’s leading authority on Vietnamese communism,

Douglas Pike, tersely commented that earlier estimates by outsiders of the size of the party

in the South had been consistently low. The party in the South (excluding the military and

front groups) actually numbered at least 350,000 and may have had as many as 500,000

members. 25

Although the CIA consistently underestimated communist strength in rural areas, its

expanding and increasingly oppressive programs belied that false optimism. In 1959,

William Colby, then chief of Saigon station, convinced Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem’s brother, to

build self-defense forces in rural villages. This program utilized American Special Forces

to form Catholic men and women into what were called Civilian Irregular Defense Groups

(CIDG). Under this program 30,000 CIDG received arms and developed patrolling strike

forces.26

Diem’s police state found its programs unable to control the people. Beginning in 1959,

with the assistance of the CIA, it sponsored a program to move villagers into organized

communities for self defense. This concept, called “agrovilles,” generated fierce resistance

from the South Vietnamese who were forced to leave their homes to settle in the new sites.

Learning little from this experience, Diem’s government, with the CIA in the lead,

initiated the “strategic hamlet” program in late 1961. South Vietnamese were forcibly

moved into fenced and guarded compounds, and the Special Police weeded out any

Communists. An ideal strategic hamlet included a watch tower, a moat, fortifications, and

barbed wire. The program infuriated the people whose homes were destroyed to force

them into those confined sites. The strategic hamlet program died with the assassination of

Diem.

The CIA was a most reluctant participant in Diem’s removal, but other elements of our

government demanded it. After several false starts, the coup group with U.S.

encouragement deposed Diem in early November 1963. Colby called the American-

sponsored overthrow of Diem the worst mistake of the war. He said Buddhists had raised

an essentially false issue of religious discrimination.27

Various coup governments took turns ruling South Vietnam following the assassination

of Diem. There were six governments in the next 18 months alone.

The Agency continued to develop programs for rural security. First it developed the

People’s Action Teams—small teams of local armed men who provided security to the

rural villages.

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