Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume III, Vietnam, June–December 1965

45. Memorandum From the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (Helms) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Bundy)¹

Washington, July 2, 1965.

SUBJECT

• Possible Contact with the National Liberation Front

1. In response to your memorandum of 1 July,² we agree that it would be wise to inventory various modes and methods by which contact could be made with or messages discreetly passed to the National Liberation Front (NLF) should we want to decide, now or later, to take any such action. Our suggestions on this score are set forth in the attached annex.³ The matter of passing the particular message proposed in your 1 July memorandum is a bit more complex.

2. As we understand it, that memorandum suggests a contact or contacts designed to do two things:

a. Elicit information about the strength of “southern” sentiment in the NLF and “southern” concern over growing Hanoi (i.e., “northern”) domination as the war in the south expands;

b. Execute what we would call a covert action operation to plant a seed (or seeds) of concern over the future fate of southerners in the NLF movement if the war continues and “Hanoi moves in absolutely to the driver’s seat”.

3. There would certainly be no harm in trying to exert this kind of covert psychological pressure, but we doubt if the particular operation suggested would be very fruitful. Hanoi—i.e., the leadership of the North Vietnamese Lao Dong (Communist) Party—has been absolutely in the “driver’s seat” ever since it directed the NLF’s creation in 1960. It is highly unlikely that anyone has been posted abroad as an NLF representative who does not know this and who is not quite willing to accept the fact of Lao Dong control.

4. As for the information elicitation, at best our cut-out(s) would be unlikely to learn much more than the private sentiments of the particular NLF representative(s) contacted. Such information would be interesting, but not necessarily representative. The views of NLF agents abroad could easily be far out of phase with the sentiments of the cadre actually waging war in South Vietnam. Furthermore, the chances of a casual contact’s achieving even this much are quite slight; for in selecting the NLF’s foreign representatives, the Communist leadership would certainly make every effort to screen out the kind of individual who would harbor dissident sentiments or be prone to bare his innermost political feelings to casual contacts. This information, of course, could best be obtained in South Vietnam itself, either through agent assets or through a manipulated contact.

5. A further point to bear in mind, and an absolutely crucial one, is the extreme delicacy of any such operation. We would, of course, be operating through third country cut-outs not themselves identifiable as acting on behalf of the United States Government. If security broke down in any phase of this operation, however, the results could be damaging. If the Communists become aware of United States sponsorship of these overtures, they themselves could use this fact to our political detriment. If we sounded out the GVN in advance about making any such overtures, the reaction of the GVN’s new leadership would almost certainly be adverse and our very suggestions would raise grave doubts in their minds about United States constancy and reliability. If we made such an approach without advising the GVN beforehand and the Communists should learn that these approaches were United States sponsored, the Communists could do us serious political damage with our Vietnamese allies in Saigon by ensuring that the latter were made aware of the fact that the United States was dealing with the NLF behind the GVN’s back. At a minimum, if the Communists realized that such overtures were of United States instigation, they would probably discount these overtures’ immediate substantive content and construe the fact of the United States initiative in mounting them as a sign that the United States was so anxious to disengage in Vietnam that it was willing to soften its adamant stand on the NLF. This, in our opinion, would be more likely to encourage Hanoi with regard to the wisdom and eventual profit of its present obdurate course than to induce any matching gestures of conciliatory reasonableness.

6. In sum, though we certainly second the idea of canvassing our assets now to determine how we might best be able to arrange discreet contact with the NLF should it ever become desirable to do so, we do not believe that the likely advantages of the particular approach outlined in your 1 July memorandum would be worth the political risks they would unavoidably entail.

Richard Helms⁴

1. Source: Central Intelligence Agency,DCI (Helms) Files, Job 80 B 01285A, Chrono as DDP and DDCI, 1 Jan-31 Dec 65. Secret; Sensitive.
2. Document 41.
3. Entitled “Review of CIA’s Capabilities To Contact NLF”; attached but not printed.
4. Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.