• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1067 0

of all interventions, covert operations. A combat team calling itself the Saigon Military Mission had begun operating in North Vietnam under the direction of General O’Daniel and the command of Colonel Lansdale, an officer of the Air Force and later of the CIA who had led activities against the Huk guerrillas in the Philippines. Conceived and organized before the Geneva Agreement, its operations were conducted for a year after the Geneva provisions made them illegitimate. The Mission’s original assignment was to “undertake paramilitary operations against the enemy”—although technically speaking the United States as a non-belligerent had no “enemy.” Its purpose was modified after Geneva to read “prepare the means” for such operations. To that end the Lansdale Mission engaged in the sabotage of trucks and railroads, undertook the recruiting, training and infiltrating of two covert South Vietnamese “paramilitary” teams, and planted for their use caches of smuggled supplies, arms and ammunition. Since the Geneva Agreement had prohibited the introduction of all war matériel and personnel after 23 July 1954, and the United States had pledged not to “disturb” these provisions, the Mission after that date violated the pledge. While not very heinous per se and normal enough if the nation had been at war, the violation began the series of falsehoods that were to widen until they engulfed the reputation and damaged the self-respect of the United States.

A feasible alternative to the embracing of an infirm client was possible, and attempted, in fact, by the French. Accommodation with Hanoi was now openly the French aim, not only for the sake of French investments and commercial interests in both North and South, but also to test Mendès-France’s political philosophy of peaceful coexistence. The French government, reported Ambassador Douglas Dillon from Paris, was more and more “disposed to explore and consider … an eventual North-South rapprochement,” and in pursuit of this aim sent a major figure, Jean Sainteny, to Hanoi. A former colonial official and a Free French officer during the war, he had maintained relations with Ho Chi Minh and served during the Indochina war as French Commissioner for the North. Ostensibly his mission in Hanoi was to protect French business interests, but Ambassador Dillon learned that Sainteny had convinced his government that South Vietnam was doomed and that “the only possible means of salvaging anything was to play the Viet-Minh game and woo the Viet-Minh away from Communist ties in the hope of creating a Titoist Vietnam which would cooperate with France and might even adhere to the French Union.”

While the Titoist solution now seems illusory, it was no more so than the American belief in building a strong capable democratic alternative to Ho Chi Minh in the Diem regime; one scenario could have been tried as easily as the other. The French program did not work out because Mendès-France lost office in 1955 and because French businessmen, unable to realize profits under Communist restrictions, gradually withdrew from the North while the French hold in general was being reduced by the United States.

Failure, however, does not necessarily mean that the goal was impossible. Ho’s primary object at this time was to gain and maintain Vietnam’s independence of France just as it was Marshal Tito’s to gain Yugoslavia’s independence of Russia. If the United States could aid Tito, why should it have to crush Ho? The answer is that the self-hypnosis had worked: mixed with a vague sense of the Yellow Peril advancing with hordes of now-Communist Chinese, there was felt to be something peculiarly sinister about Communism in Asia. As its agent, North Vietnam remained “the enemy.”

The client was not doing well. An attempted coup d’état by Diem’s antagonists in April 1955, a Cabinet crisis and the active disloyalty of his Chief of Staff revived American anxiety. According to a New York Times correspondent, his government “has proven inept, inefficient and unpopular,” the “chances of saving it were slim” and “brooding