229. Memorandum of Conversation Between the Counselor for Political Affairs in Vietnam (Mendenhall) and Vice President Tho, Saigon, June 26, 19621
SUBJECT
- Current Situation in Viet-Nam
(Note: During my farewell call on the Vice President he promptly suggested we drop our official capacities and frankly discuss the Vietnamese situation as man to man. It is therefore requested that the recipients of this memorandum regard it as containing very sensitive information and make no further distribution of it.)
After discussing the morale and the military situation at the Vice Presidentʼs request, I stated that I thought that the strategic hamlet concept represented a fine idea but I had rather deep reservations over the way in which it is being executed. The Vice President immediately expressed complete agreement and stressed the importance of executing this program in a manner which will not alienate the peasants. He stated several times that it is absolutely necessary that the peasants be paid for the work which they are doing on the strategic hamlets and [Page 476] took the position that this is indispensable if they are to be won over to the Government. He said they cannot be asked to make further sacrifices without payment. He noted that he is receiving many complaints, both oral and written, from people in the rural areas about the way the strategic hamlet program is being executed. He referred to the recent ambush attack on a military convoy 1-1/2 miles from Ben Cat in which two U.S. officer advisors were killed and pointed to this as an instance where the people in the area could have given the Government forces advance warning, but did not because they had not been won over.
I said it is important to establish priorities for the construction of strategic hamlets and indicated that we are emphasizing this constantly at the various layers of the GVN. The Vice President agreed stating that there are insufficient military forces, civilian cadres, money, etc., to try to do too many strategic hamlets at once. It is far better to carry out the program slowly but surely than to try to push it to a hasty conclusion. In the end time would have been saved by the former method.
I stated that establishing priorities requires a rational organization. on the part of the Government. Again, the Vice President agreed but added with emphasis and repeated it several times, a rational organization without interference. He referred to the fact that about a year ago he was offered the post of Coordinating Secretary of State for Security and said that he had refused it precisely because he knew he would not be permitted to do the job without interference by others in the GVN.
We both agreed that we do not really know how to solve this organizational problem of the GVN. I referred to USOMʼs effort to provide resources directly to the province chiefs as a means of getting around the organizational problem. The Vice President said that this would work, however, only as long as there is approval in principle by the central government of a particular operation, since otherwise Saigon will frustrate this method of meeting the problem.
The Vice President then said, however, that there is one extremely important way in which the United States can use money directly and effectively in the provinces—in the intelligence field. He said that if the proper rapport is established between U.S. advisors in the provinces with the province chiefs, they will find it possible to hand over money directly to the latter for the improvement of intelligence networks through adequate payment to informers. To establish the right kind of rapport the Vice President emphasized the importance of assigning Vietnamese language officers to these advisory positions. Recognizing the practical difficulty in obtaining enough such officers to meet all the requirements, he said it would be sufficient to assign one rotating language officer to three or four provinces for this purpose. [Page 477] The Vice President strongly stressed that at the present time the intelligence agencies of the GVN scarcely know the enemy at all. He asserted that information of a reliable kind can be obtained if sufficient funds are available to send agents into the enemy areas to collect it. The Vice President indicated that he could not overstress the importance of this and suggested that, if necessary, we divert to this intelligence purpose part of the funds that we are expanding in Viet-Nam for other things. He indicated he was not thinking of small amounts of money, but in terms of many millions of piasters.
Since the Vice President had brought up the influence of money in connection with the success of both the strategic hamlets and the intelligence programs, I felt it was important to determine whether he considered this monetary factor of major importance in both central and southern Viet-Nam. His immediate response was that he was thinking particularly of the people in the southern area since they were the ones he knows from his long experience as a province chief. He added that if the southern area could be held against the Communists it would not be too hard to hold the center, since the south provides the bread basket of the country.
The Vice President declared that it is important to act quickly in taking the proper measures to deal with the war. He warned that it should not be allowed to drag on too long because that would discourage the people, and at this point he warned with solemnity that the “Lao solution could be catching.” He also indicated that it is important to bear in mind that during the resumed Geneva Conference on Laos2 the Viet-Cong may well try to pull off a sensational coup, such as, for example the capture of Pleiku.
The Vice President indicated that he hoped that we do not believe the figures put out by the GVN on Viet-Cong casualties. He said many of these casualties were not VC at all but members of the population killed by the GVN forces. If all these casualties were VC, he said, the war would be over.
(It is of interest that a reliable American source told me about two weeks ago that Vice President Tho had just said to him in a conversation that, if another coup attempt comes which appears likely to eliminate President Diem, Ngo Dinh Nhu will see to it that the Vice President is eliminated through assassination during the attendant confusion. When the Vice President was asked why then he did not take measures to protect himself, he replied stoically that he preferred not to spend all of his time under guard, but to live as normally as possible. The Vice President said he would be prepared to die, but would have preferred to be killed by the Viet-Cong rather than by “one of our own.”)
[Page 478]Comment: The Vice President would, under normal constitutional processes, succeed to the Presidency if anything happened to the President. Elimination of the Vice President would leave the succession open to a man Nhu could control.
- Source: National Defense University, Taylor Papers, T-016-69. Secret; Limited Distribution. See footnote 1, Document 228, concerning routing of this memorandum. Also sent to Nolting, Trueheart, Richardson, Harkins, Weede, the Vietnam Working Group in Washington, and INR.↩
- The Geneva Conference on Laos resumed on July 2 and concluded on July 23.↩