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343 chaPTer 15 A Matter of Running City Hall At the end of 1970, with communist main forces still avoiding contact, the preponderance of military strength in the heavily populated areas of South Vietnam lay with the Saigon government. In Long An Province, for example, the GVN’s Regional and Popular Forces totaled 16,000 men. The GVN had finally overcome its reluctance to arm a volunteer militia, and the People’s Self-Defense Forces there included another 27,000 men and women and 9,000 weapons. The PRU alone had more men than the 180-odd surviving Viet Cong guerrillas. The sole remaining VC district company now contained just 12 men, and the two provincial battalions had a total of about 230.1 This imbalance in armed force severely reduced VC access to the civilian population. Meanwhile, the GVN had finally, in 1969 and 1970, promulgated and publicized radical land reform measures. As a result, the issue of distributive justice, formerly a communist monopoly, lost much of its value as a VC recruiting inducement. The communists’ military impotence had allowed some reconstitution of GVN village administration, and this in turn increased the isolation of many party organizers and administrators from their peasant base. In these circumstances, which did not exclude a continuing peasant vulnerability to communist proselyting, the deficiencies in Phung Hoang performance did not lead to a VCI resurgence, and the Vietnamization of military and security programs continued.2 Ted Shackley seems not to have shared Komer’s pessimism about Phung Hoang’s ability to replace the military as the main weapon against the VCI, for he continued to reduce the money and staff devoted to rural operations. He did, however, implicitly acknowledge the tendency of the light at the end of the tunnel to keep receding. In July 1970, he asked headquarters to extend by VIETNAM DECLASSIFIED 344 another year, until mid-1972, CIA funding for the PRU program. Thereafter, a “gut feeling” told him, the National Police could absorb the PRU program and deal with the VC infrastructure on its own.3 Headquarters demanded ambassadorial endorsement for this postponement and a Vietnamese commitment to assume full responsibility for PRU by July 1972. Shackley solicited both, and the money, reduced to $1.1 million after station bargaining with General Hai, was authorized in November 1970. At this point, all U.S. military advisers had left the program, but the seventeen remaining CIA officers did not resume a province-level advisory role, working instead in Saigon and at regional level.4 Whether making a virtue of necessity or indirectly acknowledging serious flaws in military PRU advisers’ performance, the station now claimed that the new advisory setup had produced “noticeable improvement in liaison . . . and quality of PRU neutralization performance, as CIA personnel [are] considerably more adept than [their] military predecessors” at enforcing discriminating selection of significant VCI targets. Three of the four ARVN corps commanders had enjoined their province chiefs to use their PRUs as CIA doctrine prescribed , and although total neutralizations were down, almost two-thirds were now said to fall into the two highest categories of Viet Cong cadres.5 Two operations described by the station in 1971 illustrated that even after the departure of provincial advisers, PRU operations could still produce both damage to the VCI and potential embarrassment to the program’s sponsors. A deception ploy in Binh Duong Province, north of Saigon, became one of the most successful operations of early 1971. The PRU leader there doubted the bona fides of a VC sapper who had ostensibly defected to the GVN some months earlier. Surveillance by PRU cadres produced only circumstantial confirmation of his suspicion, and the PRU chief suggested provoking an overt move that would justify arrest and interrogation. He proposed a false announcement of a high-level visitor from Saigon in order to lure the suspect into an assassination attempt.6 The surveillance that followed the announcement—how it was accomplished is not reported—determined that the suspect had acquired two M-26 hand grenades. Arrested with these in his possession, he confessed, and identified seven other VC to his PRU interrogators. Three days later, the PRU used the information to capture five VC and then joined provincial forces to nab eight more. Further interrogations produced a snowball effect, with twentyseven more VC arrested, including a number of GVN officials, and exploitation of these prisoners was still continuing when the station filed its report.7 In June, a more conventional operation took...

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