Tape #2

July 16th

Lodge had sent his jet to Bangkok for me to take me to Saigon since there
was no regularly scheduled flight in service. The trip was very fast and pleasant.
We arrived in Saigon after about an hour and a half. There was by now the
traditional dive into the Saigon airport and then we were there in the weirdly
fascinating South Vietnam. The streets were as dirty and traffic jams as hopeless
the people as graceful as I had remembered them.

After dropping my bags at the house of the political consulate I went to had lunch
with Lodge and his wife. Mrs. Lodge is now spending practically all her time at
Saigon even though she is technically based in Bangkok. Lodge was very chipper and
described to me again as he had already in October that the war was practically won.
The Vietcong were being badly hurt by our military measures. He expected
that by next Spring he might be looking for a way out. He said that they were being
defeated militarily, we were beginning to hurt them economically and now the big
question was whether we could arrest the countryside away from them through our
revolutionary development program. He suggested that I make that the major focus
of my activity while in Vietnam. We then reviewed some of the Washington developments.
And finally talked about his son George and other matters not relevant to my assignment.

I went from Lodge's house to the Embassy where I spent two hours with the
political consulate reading cables and drafting an outline for possible negotiating
positions to be taken up, with the government of Vietnam. I then returned to Lodg'e
house where Nitze was having drinks (Nitze, Secretary of the Navy) We talked mostly
about various negotiating problems and also about Nitze's impression about his trip

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to Vietnam. He had been very well impressed by the Marines. My guess would be that he was pretty much taken in by their briefing on civil action. I then spent an hour with General Westmoreland. General Westmoreland is a tall, courteous, somewhat soft spoken, rather bureaucratic officer. He is very honorable, and decent. He described his concept of operations to me which in effect was to keep the Vietcong main force units constantly on the move. The Vietcong method of operation was to move with one slow step and then make two rapid steps. His concept was to hit the Vietcong while they were taking the slow step and, therefore, prevent them from ever getting set. He showed me how this had worked in a number of operations particularly those conducted by those in the first division under General Westmoreland which I am going to visit later on this week.

He was extremely worried about a concentration of North Vietnamese troops which had come across the de-militarized zone and had avoided the trip through Laos. Westmoreland described this in part to the effectiveness of our aerial bombardment which was making the traditional infiltration route more and more risky for the Vietcong. He was now starting a bombing campaign in the southern North part of Vietnam in order to prevent the reinforcement of these units and he has also moved five marine battalions, four in reserve, into the area. Westmoreland told me about a planning exercise that his staff was engaged in about the possible termination of hostilities and he asked me to meet with his staff. He also invited me to dinner with him alone on Thursday evening to give us a chance to have a further discussion.

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I then returned to Habib's house and attended a dinner which he gave for the labor leaders of Vietnam as well as the Interior Minister of Justice. I never ceased being amazed by/members of the Vietnamese government speak about each other and about their own government. For example, [xxk] the Minister of Justice told me that one of the grave difficulties of Vietnam was the absolute corruption that permeated every aspect of the Administration and also every aspect of judicial procedure. In all of Vietnam he doubted that there were as many as five honest judges. In this situation it was, of course, not surprising that the people had absolutely no confidence in the government. I asked him what he was going to do about it in his new position as Minister of Justice. He shrugged his shoulders in an expressive/as if to indicate that [it was] absolutely corruption was a basic fact of life. He also criticized the military for not having any understanding of the real requirements of running a government.

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one of

Antoehr person present at the dinner was/Ky's brain trusteres. A man who had just been given title of Secretary of State in the Prime Minister's office. I asked him on what he was spending his time. He said that he had cut out a niche for himself but in order to do it it was better if he didn't talk about it. I asked him if it was in the execution or in the planning of policy. He said we have so much trouble planning policy that we cannot bother ourselves with executing it. I asked what he then was doing once a decision had been taken whether there was any follow up at all. Again there was an expressive shrug of the shoulders. I was extremely tired from my long plane trip and went to bed rather early.

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Sunday, July 17th was spent almost entirely in briefings. I spent the morning being briefed by J-33, the staff section of the military command dealing with civil affairs liaison and with KIEXIN with the Embassy. The gave me the conventional MAC V briefing about pacification broken down according to the MAC V criteria of areas that are clear, undergoing clearing, undergoing securing or other Vietcong control. They said nothing about the degree of control that the Vietcong might exercise in the countryside no about the degree to which tacit arrangements might be going on. They were primarily interested in fulfilling the formal MAC V criteria and not getting into trouble. The briefing was made by Colonel Hollis, who was intelligent but extremely bureaucratic. I spent the rest of the day with Habib working on various cables and being brought up to date. In the evening Habib gave a dinner for me to which he had invited the heads of each of the Agencies in Saigon. Not much business was being conducted. After dinner, Lodge dropped in KIEXINEX saying that he had not wanted to leave his wife. We spent about an hour or so of essentially social conversation.

I have already recorded my conversation with Tran Van Do, the Foreign Minister, on July 18th.

The day had started with a meeting of the Mission Council which I believe I have also recorded.

In the afternoon, I spent an hour with the CIA team and they explained to me both their operatins in the field of pacification and in the field of Vietcong penetration. I did not feel that this material is suitable for inclusion in a tape. The CIA personnel did believe however that the Vietcong morale was becoming shaky and that penetration would be easier in the next few months than it has ever been before. Also they made the point that the Vietcong who had up to now been operating within the population

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were now being forced to engage more and more in traditional covert intelligence
type of activities which indicated that they might no longer receive the same degree
of support to which they had been accustomed. The point that was being made was
that in the past Vietcong teams could overtly <u>insist</u> enter a village and simply
demand compliance with <u>this</u> period in many parts of the country was now
over and they had to engage rather in clandestine operations. With respect to
pacification the consensus was that the cadres were now just beginning to go into
operation and it was too early to tell how effective they were.

I then spent an hour and a half with an Army group planning for a post hostility situation. Their expectations were totally unrealistic assuming the presence of very major American forces. I told them that the only realistic assumption was that if any American forces would be kept in Vietnam after a peace settlement they would be relatively small. I also urged them to work out various options in order to increase the acceptability of what they were doing in the Pentagon and not <u>insist</u> to stake everything on one rather technical assessment. XXXXX

In the evening I had dinner with General Lansdale's group. General Lansdale had invited Thang, the Minister of Rural Reconstruction. I had met General Thang on my previous visit. He is a decisive, very articulate individual, who had just returned from a long inspection trip in the provinces. He painted a rosy picture of his accomplishments which consisted mainly of placing the cadres <u>in key positions</u> into district towns and trying to meet <u>of</u> villagers as they were being articulated to him, on his inspection trip. I have no way of knowing at this point whether the cadres are actually what they are supposed to be doing, whether they stay in the

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villages at night. Assuming, however, that they do achieve what they set out to do which I quite frankly doubt a major political problem will arise. Cadres will then become the private army of General Thang, General Thang will become a major political force in Vietnam and one will have to see how the ruling directory will react to that state of affairs. As for the rest General Thang's presentation did not in essential differ any/from what he had already told me last October. He is supplying rather formalistic criteria assuming the mere presence of his cadres is going to guarantee the effective operation of GVN control.

After Thang left I spent another hour or so with the Lansdale group which from its original fifteen has been reduced to six. It is rather pathetic what has happened to these fix individuals who eight months ago had come full of hope, swashbucklers, adventurers, not very bureaucratic types. They are now at the fringe of our operation. In some respects the laughing stock of the others. In any event, without any real influence. It is possible that the operation here is to big for them. Perhaps General Lansdale is too much of a prima donna, but granting all these criticisms, the fact remains that the one group that does have an understanding of how to deal with the Vietnamese, that does have the patience and dedication that is not bureaucratic, has to all practical purposes been squeezed out of the operation. I for one regret that very much.

July 18th

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The day had started with a meeting of the Mission Council which is composed of the heads of various agencies. Lodge presided in a very effective manner making his usual gruff comments but staying on top of the details of what was being presented. More alertly than I had noticed previously. Ambassador Porter began with a description of what was being done in the area of rural reconstruction. Porter, who had been a rather faithless deputy when I was here last, had now been put in charge of rural reconstruction and his tough, decisive may be a little inclined toward empire building but he provides the coordination that was so sadly lacking last time. One of the problems raised concerned the excessive number of visiting dignitaries who were coming through and some rules of procedure were set up to avoid this. Porter said however, that this did not apply to people like myself who are members of the family to which Lodge said that the Saigon Embassy was the only Embassy in the U.S. that had an Ambassador in Washington. XXX Westmoreland made a military briefing in some detail. various It also explained his plan of operation. So did the other heads of agencies. Unhappily, their presentations are not suitable for reproduction on tape.

One of the interesting aspects of the meeting was an appearance of a delegation from the Dept. of Labor which had been in Vietnam for a month to study manpower problems. They were presenting a complicated set of recommendations all of which amounted to bringing in more personnel, setting new committees and based on the proposition that one could simply get the Vietnamese government to do whatever one wanted and that the Vietnamese government would do whatever it had

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promised. Both propositions seemed to me extremely dubious. While they
were talking everyone was sitting there with a glazed expression on their face
at the lack of understanding of local conditions and I must say that I suffer so
much from localitis now that even I was struck by the complete divorce from
reality of a group of Washington bureaucrats and the very complicated local
situation here.

In fact there is a general attitude of restiveness with the enormous pressure
that the White House is putting on the mission, ~~To show results that can be~~
put in the newapapers. Anything that is good in Vietnam will take a long time
to achineve. Anything that can be achieved quickly is probably rarely worth doing.
In this respect, the situation is somewhat different from what ~~ixx it was when I~~
was here eight months ago. There now is a full backup in the U.S. but the
pressures tend to be self-defeating. Before the Mission Council Meeting I
had an hour with Porter who said that we in this mission carry out those instructions
that seem ~~to be consistent with our objectives here. For those which are not~~
consistent, we go to the mat. On the whole, I think this is one of the more
courageous missions that I have seen staffed by highly dedicated people. This
is perhaps due to the fact that no one comes into this ~~mission~~ miserable climate
into these frustrating conditions who does not have a high motivation. Lodge
for all his intellectual limitattions, is a good man for the top position here because
he does not get involved in bureaucratic details and because ~~of his aloof manner~~
is a good way of avoiding the bureaucratic disputes that would otherwise be
inevitable.

July 18th - Conversation with Tran Van Do, the Vietnamese Foreign Minister (which is out of order but I want to record it as long as my recollection of it is still fresh)

I met Tran Van Do at the house of Philip Habib, the political counselor of the Embassy. Tran Van Do whom I had met on several occasions on my previous visit could not have been more cordial. We began the conversation by talking about the political evolution in Vietnam. Tran Van Do thought that the constituent assembly was on the whole a positive development. He thought that political life would be more active for the next year. No doubt there would be greater difficulties for the government but in the long run it was helpful to put the government on a more legal basis. Also, he thought that the political leaders who were now absolutely irresponsible would be chastened into a sense of responsibility by participation in the constituent assembly. He then described the operations of the directory of which he had recently joined. The Directory is now composed of twenty people--ten civilians and ten military. However, he said the ten military through the Armed Forces Council were meeting separately and intended to impose their will on the civilians. In any event, a forum of twenty was too unwieldy. And that many of the civilians were intimidated by the military. He went through a list of the civilians reading their names and indicating the ones who were willing to speak up. It turned out that only one other civilian, except him, would ever be prepared to contradict the military. He said this in the long run was an untenable situation. As Foreign Minister he was in the position of having ten mothers in law in the military each of whom thought he could give

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instructions. The military, according to Tran Van Do, were far from united. They did present a united front but there were many cross currents. One of the difficulties among the military was their desire to place their favorites in the key positions. While they rarely pushed their favorite directly they tended to veto appointments other than those of their favorites. As a result many leading Ambassades were, at the moment, unfilled, while other positions were being maintained by charge d'affaires. Another example was that Tran Van Do had been given an order to fire his chef de cabinet even though no reason was given. However, he had no intention of carrying out this order. Then again his liaison officer to the international control commission was being drafted into the Army where he would be a First Lieutenant. The difficulty was that now he would have to find somebody to be liaison in one of the most delicate roles that could be performed. In short, the generals had no idea of how to conduct foreign policy and understood nothing about the subtleties. Tran Van Do gave an example of where General Ky had called him in and had said that he had heard that the Vietnamese Ambassador that he was not opposed to in the United States had said/Communism. Tran Van Do had to spend a week getting the text of the letter and it turned out that the Vietnamese Ambassador had said that he was not opposed to the idealist portions of Communism but he was violently opposed to the organizational parts and to the foreign domination aspects of Communism.

We then turned to the issue of peace. Tran Van Do said that, of course, no matter how long the war would go on it would have to end someday and when it ended there would have to be a negotiation. I asked him what forum he thought was most suitable for a negotiation. Tran Van Do said that he had been at

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Geneva in 1954 he knew that a Geneva type forum was the worst possible type
and that almost any other forum would be preferable. In a Geneva type forum
would find very difficult to accept. Particularly with respect to cease fire and
coalition government. I suggested that then left negotiations with either
North Vietnam or with the combatants within the country. Which of those two
did he think would be easier to deal with. To my amazement Tran Van Do said
that it would be easier to deal with the national liberation front than with Hanoi.
The National Liberation Front was likely to be hurt more and also it was not
composed entirely of Communists. There were some non-Communists who
were Vietnamese nationalists who might be spread away at through negotiations.
I asked him whether he had any indication that this was so or whether he was just
expressing his hope. He said that he did not have any index indication. Several
attempts had been made in Paris to deal with NLF representatives but it had
been unsuccessful. I asked him to be a little more specific. Tran Van Do said
that there had been a contact not with the NLF as such but with individual NLF
representatives who had been told by the Vietnamese government that they would
have an honorable place in Vietnamese political life if they came over. He thought
that this might be a framework for negotiations. However, he thought it was still
premature. The NLF was not heard enough yet for any major defections to
occur. Nevertheless, if the present trend in scale of operations continued another
six months, he thought that these feelers should be renewed. Tran Van Do thought

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that Paris was the best place for the Vietnames government to get in touch with the
NLF.

Habib and I then in a rather cautious way asked him whether his objection
to a Geneva Conference would apply also to a conference confining itself to
working out guarantees for what the GVN might work out directly with the
NLF. Tran Van Do said, "No". Indeed, he thought that this might be a good
idea. However, he pointed out that while he was in favor of the course indicated
there was no telling what the generals thought. The generals were by nature
opposed to negotiations. For example, last year after he had published his
four points, General Thieu a month later made a speech in which he said that
Vietnam would march north. Similarly, a few weeks ago, General Ky had told
him that things were going so well now that there was no need for negotiations.
Their notion was to exterminate every last Vietcong or to take him prisoner.

HKX Tran Van Do's notion was that there were so many Vietcong now that they
would have to be integrated into the political life at some point. And that, therefore,
some sort of negotiation to accomplish that would be necessary and, finally,
it would be easier to do this with the NLF that with almost any other forum provided
military operations were continued energetically. He was opposed to any form of
cease fire which granted the Vietcong safe areas. He was completely opposed to
any coalition government. Though he did not oppose the participation of NLF
members, in the political process as individual private citizens. T

The conversation then turned again to the political process within Vietnam.
I asked Tran Van Do what he expected from the Constituent Assembly

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he said unahppily, the Vietnamese were not in the habit of cooperating with each other. None of the groupings represented there in the Assembly was likely to have an organizational base and it was therefore in all probability going to be extremely fragmented. On the other hand, he said the need to accomplish something might bring about a unity that did not exist when these politicians were in opposition. Allthemore so as many of them realized that this might be their last chance, for a long time, to participate in the political process. Tran about Van Do was unahppy of the preprerogatives that the Directory had reserved for itself specifically the right to ammend the Constitution. After it had been drafted by the Constituent Assembly. And he thought a great deal depended on managing the transition from military to civic rule in an orderly fashion. He made a distinction between civic and civilian rule because he did not exclude the Generals from participation in the political process after the election. But they should do so then on a more constitutional basis than now.

I asked Tran Van Do whether how he explained the fact that the South was so fragmented and the North was so monolithic. Was there a difference in character between North Vietnamese or South Vietnamese or could it be explained entirely by Communist ideology. Tran Van Do said that it could be explained largely by Communist ideology and organization. Plus the fact that South Vietnam had been under authoritarian rule for a dacade or more and a weak authoritarian rule at that and that it since then had had no constitutional base.

He said there was a sad dilemma in South Vietnam. People were saying that one needed democracy in order to have freedom. But it turned out that if you gave

democracy to South Vietnam you would have anarchy and you would have loose
freedom. I said that this was the classical dilemma of political theory which
was not peculiar to Vietnam and which also in the West had required many
decades indeed centuries to balance out.

Tran Van Do said in conclusion that on the whole he was more optimistic
than he had been in a long time and he thought that if we persisted in the war
effort and if we did not get too nervous that the war could be brought to a reasonable
conclusion though he saw no chance of unconditional surrender.

JULY 19th

I agreed today with my State Department Control Officer that the State Dept. personnel would keep a record of my conversation with Vietnamese in order to save me the trouble of recording it. every evening, because my schedule is simply too hectic.

I began the day with a two hour session with Lodge in order to discuss a cable which he was sending back to the Department on the subject of negotiations. We also discussed the misconceptions in Washington about the situation in Vietnam. Too much emphasis was being given, according to Lodge, to technical aspects of Constitution building and too little to the fact that his was a very unstable, very weak society and at the same time a government to which we could not dictate. He asked me to use my influence in Washington not to send him out an expert on constitution. The needs are perfectly obvious. There had to be a strong executive. The legislature should be encouraged to form a few solid groups and a convenient model. would be the Korean Constitution beyond that there would not be too much sense in going into fine points. Any expert who might be sent out to dox from the United States would only confuse matters because he would not know enough about Vietnamese conditions.

I then had a briefing from an Embassy officer about conditions in North Vietnam. It was the consensus of that group that North Vietnam was still convinced that it would win the war by wearing us down. There was no realistic prospect of negotiations. The rate of defections of North Vietnamese units was relatively small. To be sure we were picking up documents that spoke of difficulties of food protection in Vietcong areas and there is no doubt that the strain was beginning to tell on them. But this

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was a far cry from saying that they were ready to negotiate. The Vietcong infra-
structure in the villages had barely been touched even though more emphasis was now
being put on the military aspect and less on the aspect of helping the population.

I then lunched with Golonel Willson, the Mission Coordinator, a tall, blonde,
extremely good looking man who used to be in charge of special intelligence in the
Defense Department and who impressed me very much as Program Officer of the
AID Mission when I was here last time. Willson began by reviewing the various
agencies and their abilities. He thought that CIA was fussy, very operationally
oriented with little understanding of the political requirements. It had a tendency
to use security as a cover up for lack of conception. It's new director, John Hartz,
was an intelligence type, who perhaps did not understand the requirements of Vietnam
particularly well. There was a
of Vietcong penetration and an emphasis of
pacification---not because pacification was important but because it was easier
whole
to do. Also, they had changed the top echelon of the CIA with the result that
everyone was practically starting from scratch and that no bench mark existed.

AID was handicapped by the fact that its head, Charlie Mann, was in way over his
steps. The operation in Vietnam was so much bigger than anything he had ever
experienced in Laos that he simply could never get on top of it. In Laos he could
run AID as a one man show; in Vietnam, the problem is much too difficult. Moreover,
Mann had no ability to communicate with Lodge and he got into too many bureaucratic
with MAC V. Time and again he would send direct cables to Washington in order to get
things adjudicated but he was outstaffed by MAC V at every turn. Wilson thought
that Mann would have to be replaced. In addition to the difficulty of Mann, there was

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the problem of the field personnel. Probably AID has the weakest personnel of any
in the field because of the difficulty of recruiting first rate people on a temporary
basis and because of the extremely mixed motivations of people entering the program.

MAC V, the military headquarters, was overly bureaucratic. It was doing a good
job in getting on with units in the field. It was beginning to wear down the Vietcong.
It had no understanding of pacification which it dealt with much too mechanically.

Ambassador Porter was extremely intelligent but he did not know how to use his
staff, and having a tendency to work things out in his head. I asked Colonel Wilson
what, if anything had changed since I was here last. He said the biggest change has
been psychological. Both among the Vietnamese in the countryside and among the
VC. People have decided the Vietcong cannot win. The reason is military victories
and the beginning of the cadre program. It was Wilson's impression that we were
getting much more intelligence about Vietcong activities. There was not yet a very
visible change in the countryside but one could smell that x victory was at least
conceivable. I asked Colonel Wilson about the cadre program he said it was much
too early to tell. There was a danger the cadres had been expanded too rapidly.
There was a serious dissertation problem. It was not yet clear how effective the cadres
could be. There was also a danger that we would kill Minister Thang, one of the few
decent ministers in the Vietnamese government, by overpraising him and by overloading
him and thereby raising the jealousy of the other generals.

I asked Colonel Wilson whether he could tell me three things that it would be
most important for me to communicate when I got back to the United States. He said
he would think about it and let me know.

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I then had a meeting with Dan Ellsberg, a young member of General Lansdale's team who used to work with me in the Defense Policy Seminar and who worked for a while with John McNaughton as a Special Assistant. Ellsberg has travelled through the countryside and had recently returned from a visit to thirteen provinces. Ellsberg painted a grim picture of the situation in the countryside. He thought the cadre program as of now was almost totally useless. The cadres in the villages either did nothing or they provided a minimum military security. If they were used as security forces then they were only a form of improved popular force. The civic action functions were almost never carried out. If they were at all it was between 9-11 and 3-5.

He suggested that I make spot inspection and I would find them strung out in hammocks or themselves on villages. The idea of imposing fifty armed men on a Vietnamese village under the kind of leadership that the Vietnamese were getting was simply absurd because it had the practical result of inflicting another bunch of maraunders on the villagers. Most teams do not have good internal leadership or district supervision.

To be sure, there was a supervisory staff of 15 at the provincial level but this was used as a pure barrel by which the province chief paid off family and other friends with CIA funds. There were only two men in the whole cadre organization a Colonel Chau and a Major Bei who gave Ellsberg any hope at all. I asked Ellsberg what one had with this program and he said very little. The situation in the countryside had not improved in any way--there was no discipline the last six months. Self-health projects were almost never completed in the way they were conceived. Rather than being used on projects which the villagers wanted and in which the villagers were willing to carry out themselves, they were become a way by which province chiefs spent funds.

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allocated from Saigon and it led to a lot of contracting. People are paid for their
labor rather than contributing it as is conceived because usually they do things
which the village chief wants not which they want. Two things are necessary
(1) improvement in the security against guerrillas (2) improvement in provincial
administration. Ellsberg felt that the Vietnamese army was almost totally
useless in operations against main forces and it was dangerous when it was used
against guerrillas because of its high-handled methods. It should be put
under the district commander and broken up into smaller units to carry out
saturation operations against guerrillas. Secondly, the responsiveness and confidence
ofx competence of provincial administrations had to be changed without such a change
we were simply shuffling dirt against the wind.

The personnel system in Vietnam was impossible. One had to find a
better way of distributing personnel and also of recruiting personnel. I asked
Ellsberg what points I should make when I came home. He said there were three
essential ones (1) no progress in Vietnam is possible unless there is a significant
 improvement in the Vietnamese army (2) if necessary to change the attitude both
 of the Vietnamese army toward the population and of the provincial administration
 it is
(3) if necessary, to recruit better leadership by widing the base from which top
personnel was drawn.

The Vietcong draw from the peasantry and promote from the basis of merit.
The GVN confines itself to the small group of bourgeois which is extremely poorly
motivated. (4) it was necessary to improve the security in the countryside. The
main force operations had had next to no impact on the security of the villages and

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the guerrillas were still as powerful as on my last visit in the vast majority of the
country.

After my meeting with Ellsberg, I saw General Chieu, the third man in the
Directorate, with whom I had a long and cordial talk which is being reported
separtately.

In the evening I had dinner with the head of the consultative assembly
with Dr. Dan and two others which is also the subject of a State Department
memorandum.

["- 13 -", "JULY 20th + 21st", "I spent the morning seeing two Buddhist leaders Ho Giac, who is the assistant of Tam Chau and Moi Can Truyen, a full memorandum report of these meetings by my State Dept. escort officer and in order to save time I am going to incorporate that in my diary. I might, however, use this occasion to record the personal impressions.", "Ho Giac has the shrewdly, beatific face of all the Buddhist political activists that I have heretofore met. He will try a ploy and if he fails he will immediately reverse course and try another tact. For example, he was feeling out very carefully how much support we would actually give the government and whether there might be any American indication of willingness to encourage more Buddhists xitox riots. When I told him it was very difficult for Americans to understand how a Buddhist supported movement could say the things that Hue radio had been saying during these the struggle movement. He immediately retreated and argued that 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x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x_x

[Y]

- 14 -

Moi Van Truyen is a Buddhist lay leader, in effect the leader of the largest organized Buddhist group in the south which, in the past, has not been politically very active. Van Truyen gave me the same long speech about the lack of legitimacy of any existing government that he had given previously. He was very hostile to the idea of elections and indeed to any successive government to Ky as well as to Ky because he argued that any legitimate government in Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh's which had been handed over authority by Bao Dai and that no other basis for legitimacy was possible. No, you cannot add anything you add to zero is still zero he said somewhat paradoxically. He is a somewhat abstract and theoretical man to whom I judge not/being a major force.

I had lunch with Dr. Vien, the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of education and social welfare and also a member of the governing directorate. Dr. Vien, is one of the ablest Vietnamese that I have met and cable of carrying an argument if not from A-Z, at least from A to the middle of the alphabet. He also is able to give an answer with something less than the endless rhetoric that is so characteristic of the others. He is larger in height and taller than the average Vietnamese and he has somewhat coarser features however his eyes are extremely expressive.

After my meeting with Vien I returned to the Embassy and I had a brief talk with a newspaper man from the *Neue Zuercher Zeitung* by the name of Kux. I also spent an hour with the Ambassador going over his weekly report to the President. He asked many questions about the situation in Washington and he gave me again an extremely optimistic account of the situation in Vietnam.

- 15 -

[N]

I had dinner with the three political leaders and two Embassy officers at the house of the political counselor which is being reported separately.

The next day, JULY 21st, was my first visit to the provinces. As it turned out it was scheduled for the Bien Hoa area, which is the headquarters of our second field forces which is really the designation for our Corps headquarters. The road from Bien Hoa to Saigon a distance of about forty miles, is a super highway and is always listed as a show piece for a cleared road and in flying over it one can see a lot of traffic on it. However, when I proposed to go to Bien Hoa by road I was told that there had been sniper on the road and that it would be too risky for me to travel there by car. I, therefore, had no choice except to go by helicopter. Another sign of the situation is that in my helicopter had two machine gunners on either side and a machine gun in front. As we approached the provincial guns were trained on the ground. I was met by the representative from the AID mission. and spent an hour and a half with him and the CIA representative reviewing the situation in his province. The first talked to the AID representative and asked him about the cadre program. He said that the cadres in Bien Hoa had so far been quite ineffective. They were not trained quite properly and they were expected to operate beyond capacity. Changing attitudes of a country is a hard task and there was no reason to suppose that the cadres were immune from the difficulties that permeated everything in Vietnam. There was a great danger that they would become as parasitic as the officials whom they were supposed to assist. There was also a tendency for them to become a private army. It was the experience of the so called revolutionary countries

[Y]

- 16 -

did not stay in the villages at night particularly in areas that were not very secure. Also there was a tendency to keep them in a area for too short a period of time in order to show some paper progress and then to move them on. He thought the self-help projects were quite effective except that there was a tendency to do the things that the village chiefs wanted rather than what the villagers wanted. In fact the whole planning process for AID suffered from the inability that a number of projects were passed on from the top reflecting the predilections of either some American official or some Senior Vietnamese official. By the time they reached the villages they might have little relationship to what the villages really needed. The province chief was described as fairly good. When I asked the AID individual to tell me what changes had occurred in the last six onths he said that the major change has been not that any area has become pacified but those areas that are listed as pacified have been perhaps more securely pacified but there would be no major change on the ground. Also there has been an improvement in the fact that the corps commander who was really running his own private show had been removed and replaced by seemingly more efficient individual. He told me a story of an operation former in which the/corps commander simply stopped itx because he had a personal quarrel with the province chief. That sort of thing seemed to have ended.

Nevertheless the AID fellow felt that we were only, at best at the very beginning of an endless process and he could not really say that a major change had occurred.

I then talked to the CIA representative who was a very impressive man. so-called I asked him also about the/revolutionary cadres. He said that the difficulty

- 17 -

was that they were not nearly of the *xx* required qualities. The cadres get away
with anything that they can get away with. We have to face the fact that most of these
highly teams composed of individuals who are in there (a) because they are paid
well and (b) because they don't want to be in the Army. Whatever discipline exists
is maintained by brutalities and the CIA man had seen team leaders *xx* beat up their
subordinates as a means of enforcing discipline. His impression was that the cadres
in the field *xx* doing whose job it was to provide security and engage in civic action
might do a little civic action and would provide security only if they were *xx* directly
attacked, *xx* of the time *xx* They were in his words goofing off. He also *xx* expressed
*xx* complained about the desertion rate of his teams which was ab out 20%
*xx* *xx* One of the difficulties of the frequent movements of the cadres was
that *xx* as soon as the cadres had moved out of a village the Vietcong moved right
back in and then took terrible retribution. For example, in one village that had been
listed as *xx* the Vietcong came back in, gouged out the eyes of the four popular
forces which were supposed to have been left behind for security and then machine
gunned them all along their bellies. And this happen only three kilometers from a
district capital. The difficulty with the revolutionary cadres was even further
magnified by the police forces field forces. For example, a few weeks ago 130 came
in and now there are only 40 left--the rest have deserted together with their equipment.

one
Mr. Enders then expressed doubt about the MAC V pacification criteria. If X asked
for example what percent of the villages one could sleep at night of those listed as
pacified, he would have to say that there wasn't one village in the whole province in
which he as an individual would be prepared to sleep, at night as a regular matter.

[N]

- 18 -

And even though 50% of the hamlets were listed as pacified, he would not be prepared to sleep in more that 25% of them even as a one shot affair. Then there was a district called Dian which is listed as pacified. He would doubt very seriously if this is true. The most serious difficulty was that of the Vietnamese army. Their discipline was incredible and their method of operation very poor. For one thing they would always take a break between 11:30 and 3:00, for another, they would not fight at night. This already limited their scale of operations. Then he described an operation at a rubber plantation where some of his reconnaissance teams are under CIA control had pinpointed an opposing Vietcong force. He then had asked for a regular Vietnamese army battalion to assist him in cleaning them out. This was treated as an outrageous request and refused. When he pressed further it was refused. It turned out the battalion was supposed to do was to string out in a line and go into the plantation and drive the Vietcong towards a blocking position which the CIA trained reconnaissance forces had set up. The battalion commander was of the opinion that if this was attempted in his whole battalion would desert so he had therefore arranged to string out his company into a drive and put the battalion bunched up into a blocking position. But the result of it was that the Vietcong were informed and got away. Indeed, as they got into the villages during the operation the villagers told them that the Vietcong had announced to each other that they were going to leave. Because a battalion sized operation was going to be taking place in the area. Security is a very serious problem and lewding is yet another one. There seemed to be a fair amount of tacit accommodation going on. For example, he knew of popular forces outpost located on the top of a mountain which never did anything even though the village was being periodically visited by the

[Y]

- 19 -

Vietcong. On the other hand, it wasn't being attacked by itself and he supposed that this
was a <u>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</u> form of coexistence quite common.

I then went back in the helicopter for a brief ride to the second field forces command post. There I got a military briefing by a very impressive group of officers headed by General Seamen who is Commander and also including General Knolton with whom I shared a room at Pleiku during the battle of K Pleimei. They described to me the disposition of their forces, the disposition of the opposing forces which in their area numbered sixty thousand including five thousand regular north Vietnamese and fifteen thousand Vietcong main force units. The remainder being local guerrillas.

**major**
The main thrust of their activity was directed against the main force units and the North Vietnamese regulars. There was little systematic effort to deal with the guerrillas which were expected to be defeated after the main force units had been crushed.

We discussed a number of problems including where a cease-fire would leave them and they were of the opinion that the main disposition of their forces was such that they could not possibly tolerate a cease-fire and that they would have to change their deployment completely.

The present concept of operations is based on the proposition of forcing the opponent to fight constantly and, therefore, first exhausting their supplies and also to spoil any operations that they might be planning. In this latter manner there was the hope of wearing down the Vietcong units. However, I asked what would happen if the Vietcong would not stand and fight but rather engage in delaying actions.

This was considered improbable because I suppose it was so much against their plans that it received no serious attention.

[Y]

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General Seaman and I got into a helicopter and flew to 1st Division Headquarters which is located about 80 miles to the North in a French rubber plantation about 30 miles from the Cambodian border. We flew over a heavy jungle and very rocky terrain which was not very populated. Again we had two machine gunnists sitting on either side of the helicopter, a back up helicopter flew near us in case we were forced down we could be picked up and two other armed helicopeters flew lower down in order to provide some security. At several points the General made his helicopter go down to point out Vietcong trails which had been hacked into the jungle. We flew along Rte. 13, one of the major north south communications lines and we found that we could see Vietcong roadblocks had been put up at night at any number of points and a large number of blown bridges. Some of the roadblocks were designed to seal off Vietcong trails which were going east-west.

General Seaman who accompanied me in the helicopter told me that Rte 13 must be traversed by the 1st Division when it returns from its present combat position along the Cambodian frontier. Looking at the dense jungles on both sides and on the roadblocks that now exist, it should be a rather rough exercise--one ideally made for ambushes.

We landed at the command post at the 1st Infantry Division which is located on headquarters of the a hilltop about five miles from the/rubber plantations. While we were landing some airstrikes were going on about three miles away from us against some suspected Vietcong concentration. We were met by General Depuy, whom I remembered as the Chief Planner of MAC V and previously as a Junior Colonel in the Pentagon.

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I had always thought of Colonel Depuy as primarily an intellectual officer concentrating on planning. Here he turned out to be an extremely aggressive combat commander. His somewhat unfeeling impression is perhaps caused by the fact that bloodthirstiness does not come naturally to him and that he, therefore, may exaggerate his aggressiveness.

Colonel Depuy gave me an hours run down of the operations he had run during the last month. They were exceedingly impressive. His basic tactic is to try to goad the Vietcong into an ambush and then to ambush the ambushers--something he has brought off with enormous success on three occasions. On one occasion he told his Vietnamese counterpart that he was going to send a column down one road while his main forces would go down another. Certain that this information would be leaked back to the Vietcong. He then sent the columns in the direction that he had indicated but assembled the main force at a helicopter plane. He had also registered his artillery on all likely ambush sides and when the Vietcong attacked they lost practically a regiment.

Another interesting exercise that he is engaged in is to pass one battalion in a province on a permanent pacification mission. He is going to keep it there if necessary for a whole year in order to make sure that the Vietcong infrastructure would be routed out. This I consider an extremely wise development and one of the few hopeful things that I have seen here.

We then had lunch with a staff of the 1st Division. I find Americans at their best in these dismal surroundings where Vietcong are everywhere where they are cut off from all overland communications supplied entirely by air. Many of them

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officers were extremely worried about public opinion in the United States. I reassured them, as best I could, and probably beyond my real convictions

After lunch we got back into our helicopter and flew to the air strip at Bien Hoa. General Seaman, who was entering into the spirit of things and who made the helicopter fly low over the so-called iron triangle which has been the over scene of some bitter battles and which is a Vietcong base area and also/parts of war Zone X Z which is another Vietcong base area which has been in effect unchallenged since World War II or since the French were here. When we landed at Bien Hoa I was received by the military sector advisor and reviewed the pacification problem with him. Like most military men he felt an obligation to give me an optimistic account. Nevertheless when I questioned him his answers coincided with those of the civilians in effect. He too felt that even though 60 % of the province was listed as pacified from Mac V reports he would not be prepared to sleep in more than 25% of the hamlets which were listed as pacified. He also felt that the Vietcong were capable of extending some pressure on almost every villager in Bien Hoa outside the main city of Bien Hoa itself. Of its popular forces, he said that only about 50% of them were engaged in patrolling, the others tended to be locked up in their outposts. As for the district chiefs they had six of whom two had been replaced, three recently for gross incompetence and one of them was absolutely venal and probably engaged in a tacit deal with the Vietcong.

I then called on the district chief of the most pacified district who did not add much. I also made a courtesy call on the province chief of Bien Hoa province

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and I met briefly with the provincial council. This meeting was significant primarily for the fact that the members of the provincial council express strong hope for the elections as a means for restoring civil government.

We returned by helicopter to Saigon. On the way in from the airport we passed the Buddhist youth center and our car passed in the middle of one of these enormous traffic jams a wild looking Monk with wild looking eyes carrying a cannister under his robe banged against the car and shouted imprecations. I thought that perhaps we might have hit him or that he might have fallen against the car. He seemed intoxicated and staggered across the street. We moved on another twenty yards when suddenly we saw many people run and saw a cloud of smoke rise from the Buddhist Youth Center. The monk we had seen had set himself on fire. As it turned out he did not die and is now in the hospital in Saigon.

With all this excitement I did not get back to the house until seven. Half an hour later was called for by a protocol officer from MAC V headquarters for dinner with General Westmoreland. I was done with General Westmoreland and we reviewed the situation, his plans, and his needs for a build-up. I was struck by the fact that last year he was arguing for a build-up of forces to the present level with many of the arguments he is now using for a build-up to new levels. Last year he told me that if he got the forces he is now getting he would have a victory within a year or at most two. Now he is saying that he can, with present forces, avoid defeat but he cannot guarantee anything except a very slow progress. He also explained to me some of the problems of infiltration. And in therecent battles in Quang Tri where the Marines have been fighting three divisions of

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North Vietnamese several of which have come across the de-militarized zone.
He said that our supply routes were to all praktixal purposes not being used
partly because of the rainy season, partly because of our interdiction campagin
the details of which cannot be put on tape.

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Tape #3

An addendum to my conversation with the province chief at Bien Hoa.

I asked the province chief whether he was worried by the threat of a boycott of the forthcoming elections. He said that he would have a very large turn out in the elections in the pacified areas. I asked him how he knew this. He said that every citizen had to have an identity card and that this identity card was given a special stamp at the election. Any person who did not have that stamp would receive discriminatory treatment in anything that the government might be in a position to do for him which, in Vietnam, is almost anyhing. As a result, he expected a very large turnout.

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Tape #3

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July
June 22nd

I left in the morning at 8:00 a.m. for the two Delta provinces that I had visited the last time. These were Rach Gia and Vin Longh On this trip for some reason I have the assimilated rank of a four star General and as a result I have at my disposal, two Army pilots and a Colonel as an aid in addition to my State Department escort officer.

The plane is somewhat better than the frightening air American planes I rode in last time. On the way to Rach Gia I talked to Colonel Plummer, the aid that was assigned to me for this trip who is with the pacification section of MAC V. He said that of the two provinces I would see Rach Gia was about on schedule in its pacification program and Vin Longh, the other one was behind schedule. Of course, whether a province was on schedule or not depended very much on the savvy wisdom and the discrimination of the officer making the report because the criteria were highly elusive. It depended also on the dedication of the province chief. There was always a high incentive to do things which would show up visibly in terms of the MAC V criteria. It was the judgment of Colonel Plummer that at least 25% of the cadres sent into the provinces were inadequate. He thought that the only progress that had been made since my last visit was in the consolidation of the areas that were already secure rather than in expanding the area of security.

I then reached Rach Gia which I had seen eight months previously. I was greeted by the province chief, by the American sector advisor, by the head of the AID mission. I first spoke with the sector advisor and his deputy. I asked him whether there was any major change since I had been there last and he felt

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that there had been no significant change. There had been a number of engagements which had ended well but there was no significant increase in the area of pacification. I asked him what percent of the population was shown on his map as secure and he said 65%. However, he added with response to another question that there was at most 15% of the population where the population could feel free of Vietcong influence or harassment and that the Vietcong were collecting about 30% of the rice crops of Rach Gia and were taxing maybe 80% of the population. There was no absolutely secure area. For example a gas station at the outskirts of town in between the town and the airport had been bombed two nights previously. Probably because it had refused to pay taxes, the Vietcong. There was a Vietcong infrastructure in most of the villages to one degree or another. The risk is higher at night than during the day. The province had received four revolutionary cadres since I was there last. Some were good, some were bad. One was totally below any standards and had had frequent clashes with villagers and finally the whole cadre deserted. Two were indifferent--that is they did not sleep in the villages at night and did only the absolute minimum that was required. On the whole the Vietnamese Army was very badly received. They were engaging in a lot of petty corruption, construction shakedowns and they had even discovered one tax collection point which had been organized by the Vietnamese army for the private benefit of the individuals.

There were seven province chiefs. One had just been fired for incompetence another should be fired, two were corrupt, two were excellent and one was pretty good. I then met with the whole provincial team including the representative of

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AID, CIA and JUSPAO, which is the public information section.

They all agreed that the basic problem was security and until security was achieved for the villagers none of the other programs made any sense. The AID representative told me that the rice millers had told him that the production of rice in the province had decreased because of the greater harassment by the Vietcong and by them. I asked about the tax policy and most agreed with the figures that had been given by the military people and about 80% of population the production was being taxed by the Vietcong and that about 30% of the rice production went to the Vietcong.

The AID representative felt that we were pushing too hard and that we were oversaturating the area with projects and that it his view we were also neglecting areas that by our technical standards were not yet secure even though they might well be capable of receiving some assistance. There was also considerable amount of complaint about the fact that the time tables for pacification were unrealistic This resulted in cadres being moved out of teams when the governmental authority was barely established, with the result that the Vietcong moved back in as soon as the cadres left.

Another example of Vietcong tax policy was the cement plant at the far end of the province near the Cambodian border. Everybody present was certain that the cement plant was paying off the Vietcong. Moreover they had to pay taxes on the water ways for shipping cement to Rach Gia. Recently there was back then they had apparently been in arrears in their tax payments with the result that one of their barges was sunk. Perhaps one reason why the Vietcong were increasing

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their exactions on rice was that the area which was available to them for taxation in other parts of the Delta were shrinking.

The JUSPAO representative, who was very good, felt that it was almost impossible to tell what the cadres were doing because the district chiefs had to benotified before they were visited and he always tipped them off. He mentioned an incident of the day before where the provincial military advisor was going to visit one of the teams and where he had, himself, seen messages being sent out with the result that these teams were engaged in frantic activity when the representative got there.

I then spoke privately to the CIA representative and asked him whether he would still maintain the view of six months ago that he was watching a professional wrestling match. He said no he no longer held this view. He thought that the security situation was bad but that the maximum possible was being done. I asked him whether he was right then and things had changed or whether things hadn't changed much, since then and he had assessed them wrong. He replied that he was probably wrong then but that things had not changed too much since he had been there. He did feel, however, that there was a change in the psychological attitude. One could now see the light at the end of the tunnel even thought it was a very long tunnel. The greatest weakness of the government side was the inability to produce anything like the dedication that the Vietcong had managed to achieve and until this problem was solved one could not really speak of permanent progress.

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The province chief then gave a long lunch for me to which he had invited the American advisors, the two district chiefs and the provincial council.

Right afterwards I went to the airport and left for Vin Longh, the other province which I had visited which is about half an hour flying time away.

At Vin Longh I was greeted by the province chief, the sector advisor and the head of the AID mission. We went to the office of the sector advisor where a large group had been assembled. All the military advisors of the province, the CIA representative, whom I had already met the last time and his assistant the three members of American advisory staff/division which was established had recently been established by the government. This made it impossible for me to exclude my Colonel who had been assigned to me as an aid by headquarters in Saigon as I had in all other meetings both in Bien Hoa and in Rach Gia. The result was that he sat there taking down every question and answer and getting a realistic account was like pulling teeth because all the officers knew that their answers would be reported to Washington.

I asked first whether they had any criteria for developing AID projects--that is did they ask themselves which AID project was contributin to the problem of building government or did they believe that almost anything that was being built would be of assistance in building government. It turned out to be the latter that almost anything that was being built was considered to be, in the long term, useful.

I asked whether there were any other criteria other than the ability to build and the answer was no. I then asked what the security situation was. They told

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that the area was 80% pacified according to the MAC V criteria and that there had been no change. I asked in what percent of the pacified villages Colonel Michaels, the Sector Advisor was prepared to sleep at night and it turned out he was prepared to sleep in none because the Vietcong were able to get anyone. I asked him if this was true of Americans, whether this was not equally true and is not more true of others. He said that this might be so but that the MAC V criteria did not include the question that I had asked. I asked about the quality of the district chiefs. I was told one was unambiguously penetrated by the Vietcong the others were tolerable, two were impossible.

Returning to the security situation. They said that 49 villages had been pacified in the last six months. In those 49 pacified villages 25 assassinations had taken place concentrating primarily on people who had been informers and on members of the police, civil administration being in third place. It was the estimate, in response to the question, that the Vietcong were collecting taxes from 80% of the population in Vin Longh. Indeed, it was the belief of some of those present that they were collecting taxes even in Vin Longh. I then asked how it was possible that the area was 80% pacified but that 80% of the country was being taxed by the Vietcong. The sector advisor was eager to polish his answer in Saigon said they sometimes collect taxes by mail. You ask a stupid question and you get a stupid answer.

I asked how much of the rice production of Vin Longh went to the Vietcong. The estimate was that 20 percent went to the Vietcong. I then asked how much was needed to feed the province the answer was 50% was needed internally to feed the

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province. This means that 40% of the rice production available outside the Delta is being taken by the Vietcong. Those present explained to me that most of it was being shipped to Cambodia and then by various waterways was coming back either into the Delta or into the main force units. It was the judgment of many of those present that many areas must have collusion between the Vietcong and the officials. They said based this simply on an analysis of military operations which require a major commitment of military forces to clean out the delinquents.

We had to interrupt the discussion at this point because an appointment had been arranged with the province chief and his provincial council. He gave me essentially the same briefing he had given me eight months previously. With one amusing sideline. Eight months previously when I had visited Vin Longh I asked him what percent of his province was pacified. The province chief said 80%. This time I asked him what the situation was he said enormous progress had been made in pacification since I had last been there. I asked him how much of the province was now pacified. He said 70%. I then returned to the provincial advisory team and discussed the situation of the cadres.

350 have been assigned to the province of which 270 are operational. The CIA man who is responsible for them said that basically they should be soldiers with frivolous airs and inclinations. However, they were being used at the discretion of district and province chiefs for purposes that were unrelated to their basic mission. But the two most recent teams from Biden Hoa were being put on the border of Vin Longh in one of the most insecure areas performing essentially the function of military units. One could be certain that these teams were not sleeping

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at night and, of course, no Americans can get out there to check on it.

The Vietnamese requirements for pacification were ridiculous. The tendency of Saigon was to set enormous goals which sure enough would then be technically fulfilled in provincial and district reports without any real progress.

If an area is not physically secure, nothing helps. There was a severe shortage of regional and popular forces. The province needs nine regional force companies and it has one. It should have 3,000 popular forces and it has none. When cadres leave the Vietcong very often come back and the unrealistic requirements of Saigon maximize create a high incentive to rotate the cadres, very frequently.

The spirit of the pacification effort is not always clearly understood. For example, in one so-called pacified hamlet the hamlet's asked for payment rather than being motivated to defend its own hamlet. I then made my usual census of the quality of Vietnamese personnel. In Vin Longh there are nine district chiefs, three are below standard, two are good, the other four are average. All are corruput. In the division area there are six province chiefs of whom two are impossible, four range from average to good in the opinoin of the American personnel.

I then asked about the 9th Division. The Division Advisor that it was marginally effective. It always has good intelligence but its contacts with the Vietcong on the basis of only being sure that it can win. Sometimes it opesartes in areas where it knows there is no contact. It doesnot like to operate in dispersed units for fear

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that its soldiers will desert. On the other hand, one has to have sympathy for the Vietnamese units. The division is under strain, it lacks non-commissioned officers. Moreover, where Americans come to Vietnam fight for a year and leave. The Vietnamese are permanent fighters whose only prospect is eventual death. As permanent fighters they have established a pace they can follow.

I then asked the team what I should take back to the United States with me. The Division advisor said it would be hard to make *that* big percentage gains in the future. They all agreed that it would take at least five years to clean out this area.

The CIA official said that no serious progress in pacification had been made. That in his judgment AID built an image but did not really contribute to pacification.

We then flew back to Saigon when we arrived about six in the evening and drove through one of the incredible traffic jams back to my residence. At eight o'clock there was a dinner given in my honor by General Chieu, the third man in the Directorate. Chieu is a stocky man with a very charming smile who is responsible for the civilians relationships and the political development of the present government. He, like both of his colleagues, is a North Vietnamese, who had many spent most of his years in China working with the ... He said that he considered China culturally the closest country to Vietnam. Indeed in many respects XXXXX Vietnam was a truer representative of Chinese culture than China because it had fewer foreign invasions a rather startling comment.

Other guests were Dr. Bien, the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Ahn, another member of the Directorate, several journalists, two Colonels and an insufferable

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Swiss journalist by the name of Kux, who delivered long monologues on Vietcong tactics to the Vietnamese. The meal was traditional North Vietnamese food which being largely fish was rather difficult for me.

As I have already noticed before it is very difficult on social occasions to talk to Vietnamese. They have almost no small talk and there is no interest whatever in what goes on in countries other than their own. The result is that they engage in endless monologues about their own experiences or in detailed discussions of the latest political intrigues in which one's own role is that of a straight man of asking questions. In my two visits to Vietnam, only one person has ever asked me about the impact of events outside of Vietnam on Vietnam. No person has ever asked a question about strategy. No person has ever asked me about political developments in the United States except in the vaguest possible way.

It was altogether a rather interesting evening.

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The next morning, JULY 23rd, I had a briefing from the CIA team about some of our operations in Laos to observe the movement on the Ho Chi Minh Trail which is, however, not suitable for being transcribed on a tape.

I then read some documents and finally had lunch with Buy Diem, who is a Vietnamese phenomenon. Buy Diem was the Secretary of State in Prime Minister Quat's office and is a position similar to McGeorge Bundy's. He was After the fall of Quat, Buy Diem remained as Secretary of State for Prime Minister Ky one of the few individuals who has survived a governmental purge. He is reputed to be close to the Buddhists. Some people have said that he was listed in a Vietcong document as one of their agents in the Saigon area. During the recent crisis he is reputed to have been within an age of overthrowing Ky. Nevertheless he is one of the most influential people in Vietnam. Probably because he speaks English so fluently that he is an almost invaluable contact to Americans. Recently there has been a press campaign against him and in order to take the heat off Ky made him Secretary of State in foreign ministry or Deputy Foreign Minister, one or the other. Nevertheless, he almost never spends time at the Foreign Ministry and continues in his old function as Prime Minister Ky's right hand man. Again a fuller report on the conversation is being written up, I hope, by my Embassy escort officer. I will simply list a few impressions.

devious

Buy Diem has a clever, extremely smart face. We talked about three subjects in particular (1) the political evolution in Vietnam (2) the nature of the

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Constitution that was likely to emerge out of this process and (3) the eventual
outcome of the war.

As for the electoral process, Buy Diem said that the government was deter-
mined to have a fair and free election. The provincial assemblies of XX An assembly
of province chiefs was being called for August 1st at which Prime Minister Ky
would insist that the election be conducted fairly. He thought that the
majority of the Assembly would be composed of responsible members who would
draft a sensible constitution. Depending on the behavior of the Assembly, one
could then see whether it might be transformed into a legislative assembly or
whether it should be confined to its formal function of drafting a constitution.
I asked him whether the Directory had the draft of a Constitution ready. He said
no they did not but no doubt they would be able to make their wishes felt. In
any case, they had the reserve clause of being able to veto the Constitution as
and even veto certain parts of it
long as they could get the Assembly to go along with it.

Asked what kind of a constitution he would prefer, Buy Diem said that
three possibilities existed: (1) a Presidential system on the French or
Korean model; (2) a Presidential system on the American model; or (3) a
Parliamentary system. He discarded the parliamentary system and he
thought that even the American system would not provide for a strong enough
executive. He, therefore, felt that the best solution would be a constitution
patterned on the French or Korean model.

I asked him what would happen in case of a presidential
election. He felt that one or more of the generals might resign from

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the service and run. He mentioned specifically Thieu, Van Co. Asked about Ky, he said that Ky had told him he wanted to return to the air force. Among civilian politicians who were possibilities, he/Huong was the best of a bad lot, but that none of them were very impressive.

He hoped that the Constituent Assembly would be the beginning of the emergence of a new group of political leaders, more responsible than the preceding one and capable in time of forming civilian administration.

Asked how he would envision the war ending, Buy Diem said that in his view it would probably end with Hanoi gradually withdrawing and with the Viet Cong guerrillas being crushed. If there were to be negotiations, Buy Diem said, it might be that the Viet Cong would be easier to deal with than Hanoi though it was clear that he was not much interested in negotiations. He said that the government had made a suggestion to the Liberation Front to come over, but with out any success.

Later in the afternoon I had an interview with Van Truyen, whom I had seen already on my previous visit to Vietnam. He turned out to be a is one of the most thoughtful of the politicians, who was Deputy Prime Minister in the Quat government and had been and is still influential because of the newspaper columns he is writing. The conversation with Van Truyen is being written up separately.

I then went to a reception given by Ambassador Porter for his new deputy. Ambassador Porter is in charge of our pacification effort

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and our economic aid programs here. It was a rather large gathering
including the diplomatic corps and all senior Americans. It was striking
that very few of the leading Vietnamese appeared and none of the military.
I suppose this is one of their few opportunities to show their independence.

In the evening I went with Dan Ellsberg to and two bureau
correspondents to a restaurant along the waterfront in one of those weird
settings where flares were going off on the other side of the river and an
artillary barrage was being fired not three miles away while along the
waterfront bars were in full swing and people were eating as if nothing
were happening. I then had to go to the house of the Political Officer of the
Embassy to check some dispatches.

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24 July 1966

I left for Danang about eight in the morning on a B-39 jet-- a ride which took about an hour. I was greeted by the Chief of Staff of the main forces and the State Department political advisor, who accompanied with for the rest of my stay with the Marines. Now that I have broken my fear of helicopter rides, I am using them as if they were taxis. We went, then, by helicopter from the airfield to the headquarters of the I Corps, where I received a briefing about the pacification effort in the Marine area. It was a rather formal briefing, simply repeating the MACV criteria about villages pacified, secured, cleared of VC troops, and so forth. Since the figures are of no great consequence, I will not repeat them here.

We then helioptered for about twenty minutes to the An Hoa industrial complex. An Hoa is thrifty miles from Danang at the southern tip of the Marine perimeter. I flew in two combat helicopters which had armour plate at the bottom. Two Marines with flak suits were sitting on the two open sides of the helicopter manning machine guns. Why the guards would be given bullet-proof vests, but not the visitors was never quite clear to me, but there it was. The An Hoa industrial complex is held by a battalion of Marines, whose perimeter extends 500 yards from the district complex, but the hills surrounding it are held by Viet Cong and there is a vicious system of booby-trapping. We landed in the middle of the compound coming practically straight down and I had

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four Marines assigned to me who were always deployed around me in order to minimize the risk of snipers. The industrial complex is <u>supposed to</u> be located near the only source of coal in Vietnam about five miles distant across from a road held from the Vietcong, so that taxes had to be paid for coal going into the industrial complex to the Vietcong. The industrial complex is not yet operative but it will produce when it is finished fertilizer and other <u>materials</u> nitrates.

I was briefed about the operation of the complex by a rather impressive Vietnamese civilian by the name of Kan. There is a certain <u>made</u> futility about this <u>massive</u> effort because the road to Danang is closed. Every piece of machinery has to be flown in by little airplanes, since the landing strip is short and the <u>steep</u> has to be made into it. The hope is that two years from now, when the complex is finished, the road will be open and the perimeter will be pushed far enough out so that the Vietcong cannot mortar it as they certainly could today and destroy it completely. The AID official who accompanied me <u>that</u> said that the Vietcong he suspected that Kan was paying off the Vietcong, but these things could never be proved.

We then went back into our helicopter and flew into one of the national priority areas, which are supposed to have top claims on pacification. This one was located ten miles south of Danang. We landed in an open field. I was greeted by the district chief, the village elders, and

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a Marine captain and two enlisted men, who had been detailed to me for
security. We visited the hamlet and I saw a well which had been dug by
our aid program and a school house and we walked along a road to the
next hamelt across a bridge which had been put up by the aid program.
I was told that up until two months ago it would have been too dangerous
to walk here but that it was not relatively safe. Except for an interesting
view of the total isolation of Vietnamese villlage life, it was not easy to
draw any conclusions from that experience. The Vietnamese peasants
live in simply wooden houses that are not as appallingly depressing as
Indian houses in the middle of lush fields. Even here miles away from
Danang one had the sense of total isolation and a complete divorce of
the rural population from the urban population. In fact it leads me to
wonder whether our pacification effort has set itself the right priorities.
It is true that the Viet Cong live off the peasant, but it is not true in my
judgment that we can build a society on these peasants. It is one thing
for the peasants to give some of their rice to the Vietcong; it is quite
another to inspire them to engage in taking action on a large scale.

We then went back into our helicopters and flew to Hill 55
about twenty-five miles south of Danang, The regimental command post
of the Ninth Infantry Regiment, which I had visited previously. Before
describing my visit I want to record a conversation with the Captain
who was assigned to me as my security officer in the district town. He

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told me that he was located four kilometers north of Danang as an advisor to a regional force company. Even this short a distance from Danang it was too dangerous to travel on the road at night. Asked about the effectiveness of the regional forces he said they had a tendency to set up an ambush at the same place every night, with the result that the Vietcong knew their pattern of operation and, of course, no contact with the Vietcong was ever made.

At the regimental headquarters I found out it had moved ten to fifteen kilometers from the point where it was the last time I had visited it. There had been a main line of resistance and the Marines were patrolling on both sides of it. Now the concept had been changed; the Marines had been given what is called a tactical area of responsibility, and all the patrolling takes place inside this line. Since January 1st the 9th Regiment has suffered 2300 casualties, which is a fantastic rate if one considers that a Regiment has between 6000 and 7000 men. Of these 2300 casualties over 60% were caused by mines in areas which had been considered cleared. The Regimental Commander described to me their method of operation, called country fairs, in which a village is surrounded; all the inhabitants are moved out, and asked to account for themselves; the Vietcong isolated; and the villagers then permitted to return with medicine, food, and other supplies. In theory this is supposed to work out the Vietcong infrastructure, but in practice, as the casualties indicate,