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111 chaPTer 6 Experiments in the Lowlands The self-immolations of Buddhist monks that dramatized religious unrest in the summer of 1963, and Diem’s inability either to mollify or to suppress the dissidents, paralyzed the South Vietnamese government and its campaign against the insurgency. In August, the GVN deployed Colonel Tung’s Special Forces in raids on urban Buddhist pagodas, and the station became embroiled in the question of Diem’s improper use of American-supplied resources to quell the wave of riots. The Kennedy administration soon came to despair of reinvigorating the war effort while Diem remained in power, and encouraged Major General Duong Van Minh and dissident colleagues to remove him. After much backing and filling, the plotters made their move on 1 November, ignoring earlier U.S. appeals to spare the lives of Diem and Nhu.1 In the aftermath of the coup, U.S. officials began to discover how their reliance on GVN reporting had distorted U.S. perceptions of the scale of the insurgency and prevented the Kennedy administration from recognizing the failure of the Strategic Hamlet program. A December visit to Vietnam by Defense Secretary McNamara and other officials, including DCI McCone, found both the Vietnamese generals and the U.S. Mission in a state of helpless disarray. McCone judged that, six weeks after the coup, there was still “no organized government in South Vietnam.” NcNamara harshly criticized the U.S. Country Team and what he called Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge’s total lack of leadership, and deplored the poor communication between Lodge and General Harkins. The general, for his part, seemed to believe that there was nothing wrong in the countryside that the commitment of more troops would not cure. But McNamara concluded in his report to President Johnson that unless current trends were reversed within ninety days, the country would go neutralist or communist.2 VIETNAM DECLASSIFIED 112 In the narrower context of intelligence, both McCone and McNamara acknowledged the failures of Defense and CIA reporting that had permitted groundless optimism about the Strategic Hamlet program. Blaming CIA and overall U.S. government reliance on GVN statistics for these failures, McCone called for intelligence “nets of our own,” if necessary, to assure better information.3 A more fundamental question was the composition and policy direction of the new government. The dissident generals had made it plain that they understood their own limitations as political leaders, and the station was eager to help them get off on the right foot, especially in the matter of reinvigorating the battle against the Viet Cong. But Ambassador Lodge, anxious both to limit the agency role and to avoid the appearance of U.S. manipulation of the junta, declared a moratorium on official U.S. contacts with the new regime that lasted until January 1964. Even then, when he finally agreed to let the station honor Vietnamese requests for consultation, he restricted the agenda in a way that effectively precluded examining the problems and possible opportunities of a new military government.4 In this policy vacuum, the mercurial Lodge returned to the notion of the insurgency as an exclusively North Vietnamese creation. On 20 February, he wired the president that “various pressures can and should be applied to North Vietnam to cause them to cease and desist from their murderous intrusion into South Vietnam.” The North Vietnamese were indeed assiduously supporting their Southern communist compatriots, exploiting the vacuum created by GVN passivity and American policy confusion. By the end of 1963, according to the North Vietnamese Army’s history of the war, the insurgents had reasserted control over all the land and people lost to the counterinsurgency programs launched by the GVN after the VC Tet campaign of January 1960.5 This was not literally true, of course, as the programs initiated by CIA, and presumably at least those Strategic Hamlets inhabited by self-motivated minorities like the Catholics, were still intact. And McNamara’s prediction of a Saigon collapse within ninety days turned out to be overdrawn. Furthermore, despite Buddhist suspicion of the Catholics in Minh’s new junta, religious dissent receded in the wake of the coup. But the fractious military government entirely failed to exploit the general euphoria that followed the demise of the Diem regime, and the GVN position in the countryside continued to decay.6 More Improvisation In the wake of Operation Switchback and the end of the Diem regime, the CIA Station in Saigon found itself without a major role...

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