309. Memorandum for the Record by the Commanding General, U.S. Army Mobility Command (Sibley)1
On Tuesday afternoon, 11 August 1964, during a briefing at Tan Son Nhut by General Oden and the Support Command staff, I received a message at about 1500 hours that Khanh wanted to see me at 1545 in his office. His aide took me into his office immediately on my arrival and told me that a couple of correspondents and several others who had appointments were being asked to wait. I met with Khanh from 1540 hours until 1620 hours in his office with Major Kwasigroch present. The entire conversation was in French, of which Major Kwasigroch only picked up a few words. Khanh walked across the room and embraced me when I entered, asked about Ellie, my wife, and said, “We have missed you very much here, Sib.” I congratulated him for his having become Prime Minister of his country and he said:
“I could not stand by and see my country fall to the communists. After the November coup, there was much relaxation, wining and dining, and little serious prosecution of the war effort. The intelligence organization which I had helped President Diem build up over six years was completely destroyed and many of the hard-core Viet Cong whom we had collected so painstakingly over the years were released by opening a Pandora’s box. These two things that are apparatus for learning when and where the VC were going to strike combined with the return of their hard-core leadership just released are primarily responsible for the intensification of their efforts over the last 6 months.” (My observation: Evidently, the incident rate has increased from an average of some 50 a week when I was here in 1961 to some 500 odd per week currently.)
I asked him what would be the results of the recent U.S. attack on the North Vietnamese bases. He said that the men in the streets of Hanoi reacted to this attack with smiles on their faces. I asked him how he knew this. He said that while his infiltration effort into the [Page 666] north left much to be desired, he was getting enough intelligence to know it and, if I didn’t believe him, he told me to ask our own CIA. He said this confirmed his impression that the North Vietnamese people were disenchanted with the hardships and provision under the communist regime and would welcome the unification of North and South Vietnams under his (Khanh’s) leadership. He said that he would thus become a kind of Tito. He repeated this several times and I believe that he meant to identify himself with Tito as a national leader, a champion of the people, who would thus be unified as a Vietnamese nation out from under the shadow, as he put it, of “our traditional enemy, the Chinese.” He said that the North Vietnamese, including their leaders, are afraid of the Chinese and are resisting their overtures to “help”. He said Ho Chi Minh is still there but he is too old to come to the office and that the real power is held by several of his principal lieutenants, two of whom are Moscow oriented communists rather than Peking sympathizers. He said:
“Sib, we are not expert in guerrilla warfare in spite of our ranger training center at Duc My and our efforts with your Special Forces. This is a new kind of war in which neither we nor the great powers like you have much experience in spite of our recent efforts to learn. On the contrary, these people in the north are true experts in guerrilla warfare, sabotage, assassination, political subversion, coup d’etat, and all the paraphernalia which has become classic doctrine to them since the time of Marx and Lenin. This is a war against our people and as long as we continue to try to fight their kind of war, they can succeed with only a small force of about 20,000 against the mobilization of our entire manpower to keep this going on forever. Therefore, we must open the war up. We must turn to the kind of conventional military operations which we understand and not continue to try to fight their kind of war which is new to us. If we do this, our people will rally to our cause because they will know that they are fighting for their country and the enemy will be identified to them.”
“Our penetrations in the north are primarily for intelligence not for sabotage and, while we have achieved some success, we still have much work to do.”
I asked him whether we could expect a Chinese retaliation for our strike on the North Vietnamese bases. He said:
“No, not the kind of retaliation you would expect. They only have Mig 15’s and 16’s which are Korean vintage aircraft far less capable than the American planes and I have learned that the Russians have recently cut off the supply of spare parts to the Chicom.”
I challenged him on this one and he said that this was his intelligence. He said the Chicom lack the military capability to intervene militarily in North Vietnam today and that such intervention would be opposed by the North Vietnamese because of their fear of the Chinese.
[Page 667]He said, “This is my personal view of free-world strategy and, while I have not studied it out in detail, I will tell you what I think:
“For centuries, the great powers—the British, the French, and the Russian empire under the Tzars—have had a traditional enemy, the Chinese. This has been our traditional enemy over the centuries as well. Today the Chinese have massive manpower. We, that is the great powers, have massive firepower. The Chicoms are trying desperately to build their firepower. When they do, it is impossible for me to imagine how we could live with a totalitarian and aggressive regime such as this. It would then be too late for the free world. They would go on the offensive immediately.”
“You know they are working hard to develop an atomic capability. When they are able to make their first test explosion, although it will not be significant firepower-wise, the psychological effect will rock all Asia. They will become immediately more aggressive. We can’t live with such a situation.”
“Now the South Chinese are tired of the communist regime. I mean those in Canton and the south Chinese provinces. They would welcome Chiang Kai-shek tomorrow and he has the capability of cutting China in two from East to West and liberating the South Chinese. We should first insure that the Moscow-Peking split is effective and then Chiang should split China in two. The South Chinese would be happy and would welcome him. Moreover, he has the military capability of doing this today with perhaps some support from the United States.”
Khanh again referred to the Viet Minh and the Vietnamese as seeing in him, Khanh, a nationalist leader such as Tito, but I didn’t interpret this as implying a Tito in the communist sense but rather in the sense of a strong national leader under whom his people could be reunited.
He said that he appreciated the strong support that McNamara is giving him and that he is delighted to have Ambassador Taylor here with his splendid people like General Westmoreland, who he considers the cream of the crop. He reiterated that if we continue the “people’s war” there may be no end to it, that we must open up the war, “il faut ouvrir la guerre”, unify the people in support of the national effort, identify the VC as the people’s enemy and go to conventional military operations which we understand and in which we have experience.
I told him I was so pleased to hear that he had just pinned a fourth star on General Khiem at Vung Tau and that I felt he had made an excellent choice in a loyal and very capable officer. He said,“we must have a stronger military organization, Sib, and it must be headed by officers of appropriate rank.” I gathered that he had in mind some additional promotions in the near future. He said, “I will not promote [Page 668] myself as I am now up to my neck in this political game.” He said, of course with his characteristic modesty, that he felt himself to be uniquely qualified for leadership of his country because of his experience in the political field as President Diem’s Chief of Staff as well as his military background. I observed that Diem had kept the military promotions down and had consistently resisted all efforts to achieve unbroken military chains of command in the armed forces because Diem, fearing another coup, interrupted the military chain with political appointments at province chief and higher levels who reported back to him through Nhu. I asked if Khanh still felt he had to counterbalance the military with a civilian organization. He replied that he felt the answer was to have a strong military organization with an uncompromised military chain of command and with leaders who were loyal and whom he could trust.
I recalled that he had kept the correspondents and a number of others waiting for nearly three-fourths of an hour and he said that it had been worth it to have a heart to heart chat with an old friend. I asked to take his picture in front of the stuffed tiger in his office and he said, “Why don’t we have our picture taken together, Sib?” Major Kwasigroch took a couple of pictures of us. In parting, he sent his warm regards to Ellie and asked me to bring her over with me the next time I came.
In leaving the palace, I asked his aide about Generals Don, Dinh, and Xuan, whom I had known very well. The aide replied that he was sure that General Khanh would be delighted to have me call on them in Dalat if I had time during my trip and that they would be delighted to see me. He said that of course they were not in prison, that I would understand that they had to be under surveillance for the time being.
I told the aide that I supposed the industrialist, Mr. Buu, whose steamship line and other businesses had been confiscated, would be released from the hospital before long as Vietnam needed strong businessmen of this type. The aide nodded and said he would mention it to Khanh who knew Mr. Buu very well.
I left the office at 1625 hours and drove back to MACV Headquarters where I reported the substance of the above to General Westmoreland and, at his suggestion, to Ambassador Taylor later that evening.
Major General, USA
- Source: Department of State, Saigon Embassy Files: Lot 68 F 8. Top Secret. Sibley had been Deputy Chief of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group in Vietnam in 1961.↩