A House Divided: The CIA, State, and a Coup in South Vietnam

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. Welcome to SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations. Across the globe. It's a dark moment in American history that leads to a lot of what-ifs. By the spring of 1963, eight years into the war in Vietnam, two opposing factions across the CIA and the State Department had President John F. Kennedy's ear. One side wanted to keep South Vietnam's first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, in power. The other wanted to save the country. The other wanted to see him removed. Then, unrest in Saigon caught the CIA by surprise, and the rift in Washington grew deeper. Author Jack Cheevers spent a decade piecing together and writing Kennedy's Coup, which lays out the grave decision to oust Diem, which led to his death and arguably escalated the war. The first U.S. combat troops deployed two years later. Hey, Jack. Welcome to SpyCast. Thank you so much for inviting me, Sasha. It's a big honor and a pleasure to be here. Well, I've been looking forward to it. So, can we start off by thinking about 1955, when Ngo Dinh Diem became president. How close was he with Washington? Well, he was close with Washington from the very beginning. The Eisenhower administration was giving him aid. In advice, throughout the '50s, President Eisenhower invited him to the United States on a state visit in 1957. He addressed a joint session of Congress, so he got standing ovation. He had a ticker-tape parade down Broadway in New York City, where a quarter of a million people turned out to see him. He was being portrayed in that era as an anti-communist hero who was holding his fledgling country together in the face of very severe communist aggression. When President Kennedy was elected in 1960, Diem was starting to get into a more and more serious struggle against the communist-led Viet Cong guerrilla army, and he went to President Kennedy toward the end of 1961 and asked him for help in battling the Viet Cong. Kennedy had known Diem for a number of years. He had met him in Washington in 1953 at a luncheon that was organized by the Supreme Court. Justice William O. Douglas, you know, he was a staunch anti-communist himself. He had pledged to defend liberty around the world, no matter what the cost, no matter what the burden to the United States. And so he put together a package of support for very large amounts of military aid and economic aid. The military part of that was called Operation Beef Up, and under that program, we began sending all sorts of U.S. weapons, tanks, artillery, personnel carriers, napalm, machine guns, uniforms, all sorts of weapons to the South Vietnamese government. We also supplied them with several thousand U.S. combat advisors. These weren't combat troops. These were advisors who would go into the field with the South Vietnamese army and advise them on tactics and countering the Viet Cong troops that they encountered. All that taken into account, can you then explain the incidents that led officials to have splintered views of Diem? What incidents caused this? Well, the incidents took place in 1963, and Diem at that time faced two pretty serious problems. One was an existential war against the Viet Cong, and the other was what turned into a national protest movement by the Buddhist population, which made up about 70 percent of South Vietnam's people at the time. And the background to that is that Diem was a Catholic president. Members of his family were very prominent Catholics, and the Buddhists felt that the Diem government was discriminating against them and even persecuting them in terms of not giving them job opportunities and promotional opportunities in the civil government as well as the military. The Buddhists began openly protesting, and the Diem government was faced with how to cope with that, and he didn't do it particularly well. He did a fairly sensitive job of coping with the Buddhist protests. The first incident took place in May of 1963 when a group of Buddhists were protesting outside a government radio station, and Diem's security forces moved in and wound up killing eight people. The next incident took place the following month in Saigon, where a Buddhist monk set fire to himself in the middle of a downtown intersection. What became a famous photo. And the third incident, which really kind of was the boiling point for the Kennedy administration, took place in August of 1963, where Diem sent his army and his police into Buddhist pagodas throughout the country in Saigon, denying any way. And they arrested 1,400 Buddhist monks and nuns and threw them in prison. And I'm curious to understand whether the CIA saw that unrest coming. How they viewed it, and what CIA Director John McCone thought of Diem ultimately. Well, the CIA, they were certainly aware of what the Buddhists were doing during the spring and summer. CIA agents were actually disguising themselves as newsmen and hanging around the pagodas, trying to pick up any information they could on the Buddhist leadership, what their motives were, what their next moves were going to be. But the decisive incident that happened was, the incident which was the raid on the pagodas caught the CIA completely off guard. The CIA station chief at the time, John Richardson, actually told David Halberstam, who was a New York Times correspondent, that this took us completely by surprise. We had no idea this was going on. That was very surprising because the CIA had about 200 agents and support personnel in Saigon at the time. It was one of the biggest CIA stations in the world. And they were plugged into the Xi'an government at all levels. John Richardson himself was pretty closely aligned with Diem. Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, among other things, was head of the secret police. Very much feared as the head of the secret police. Yes, definitely. And as for McCone, he was a supporter of Diem, thought Diem was doing a good job in the war. He thought that the war could be won under Diem's leadership. He opposed a coup primarily because he thought that there was no suitable alternative for Diem. He said, "No, I don't want to do that." He said, "I don't want to do that." He said, "No, I don't want to do that." He said, "No, I don't want to do that." He said, "No, I don't want to do that." Diem go? Was it that he believed this man did not represent democracy, which the United States supported, or that he didn't think that Diem would be up for the task of defending U.S. interests against the Viet Cong? Well, he had been appointed by President Kennedy, even though Lodge was a very prominent Republican. Kennedy had won against him in a couple of elections in Vietnam for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, and of course, the presidency in 1960 when Lodge was Nixon's running mate. But they knew each other, they liked each other, both from Massachusetts, both Harvard guys, both former newspapermen. And Kennedy, before Lodge even went to Saigon, brought him into the Oval Office and said, we may have to do something to get rid of Diem this year, and I hope you're up for that. So Lodge went to Saigon thinking that the U.S. government might not be able to do anything about it. And Kennedy, who was the behind the coup. And as he got to know Diem and his brother Nhu, and Nhu's infamous wife, Madam Nhu, more and more, he believed that they were incapable of governing South Vietnam. They were too repressive. They weren't handling the Buddhist situation very well, and that the war couldn't be won under Diem's leadership. And you've written that the generals who had been working for Diem and turned felt that Diem was essentially promoting people based on their political loyalties. And then in the dead of summer of 1963, JFK approves the Greenlight Cable. Can you tell us what that is? The Greenlight Cable was one of the most significant directives of the Vietnam War. And it was written by a gentleman by the name of Roger Hilsman. He was at the time an assistant secretary of state for Pharma. So he was a fairly high-ranking member of the Kennedy administration. He was very unhappy with Diem. He thought that Diem was losing the war. He thought that Diem was doing a very bad job of dealing with the Buddhist uprising. And he thought it was time for Diem to go. So he drafted this cable. It instructed Henry Cabot Lodge, who, by the way, had only been in Saigon for all of two days at the time when he got this cable, to reach out to the generals and essentially say that if the ZM goes, he's going to be able to do anything. And he did. And he did. And he did. And he did. collapsed for any reason, the United States would continue to extend the new government full military and economic support. And he drafted on a Saturday afternoon in August, almost everybody in Washington was gone somewhere on vacation or other business. He himself was with his family in Cape Cod. And so the cable didn't receive nearly as much top-level scrutiny as it should have. And it wound up that Kennedy approved it, and Lodge immediately started reaching out to the generals. And this is something that the CIA wasn't even aware of, you wrote. But let's also talk about what Kennedy himself was going through in this moment, because at the time, Kennedy himself was deep in mourning. Would that have potentially played a factor in the signing of the Greenlight Cable? Yeah. Kennedy had just lost a baby son, his son Patrick had been born on August 9th, 1963 at a hospital in Boston and died just a few days later of respiratory difficulties. And it was obviously something that weighed on President Kennedy very heavily, weighed on Jackie Kennedy very heavily. They were very much in mourning for their little son in August when they were up in Cape Cod with the rest of their family. So it wasn't the best time for him to be making major decisions, strategic decisions about Vietnam or anything else. But he did, he was president, and he tried to attend to presidential business as much as possible. How much of an impact his son's death had on him, I don't think anybody can possibly answer that question, but I find it hard to believe that it didn't have any effect on him. How sure was Kennedy upon signing the document? Well, I think that Kennedy very quickly realized that the Greenlight Cable was a mistake, that it hadn't received transparency to the high-level discussion that it should have. He felt that it should have been discussed in Washington with all his senior advisors present. He felt that it was poorly drafted. It was hastily sent to Lodge. And in fact, he brought his advisors into the White House on the following Monday morning to discuss the whole thing. And he went around the room and asked each one of them, what do you think of this? And despite his doubts about it, despite his realization that it wasn't better to send it out, he didn't withdraw. He stuck with the cable and it stayed in effect. Was there an element of the Bay of Pigs debacle in the back of his mind? Well, if you listen to the White House tapes and all the discussion of the coup that went on in the summer and fall of '63, you can sense Kennedy's hesitation, his doubts about what's going on. He asked over and over and over of his advisors, does ZM have the military strength to stay in power? Do the generals have the strength to unseat him? Are we going to win or lose if we get behind the generals on this thing? And he never says it explicitly, but I think it was very much on his mind for the Bay of Pigs. And what a debacle that was, a huge embarrassment. That was for his administration very early on. And he didn't want another Bay of Pigs. That would have been a second huge political embarrassment, a huge foreign policy setback. And I think that's why he was so concerned, and so almost myopically concerned with whether or not ZM could beat the generals or vice versa. So as we approach November 1st, which is when the coup begins, is the CIA picking up on what is happening? Are there elements from within that are trying to stop this, knowing that this cable has gone out, knowing that CIA Officer Conain has been the intermediary between Ambassador Lodge and those generals? I think the main CIA opposition to the coup was coming from John McCone. And he was telling Kennedy of his doubts. And McCone predicted with great accuracy that a coup against ZM would be followed by a period of political instability that could give an advantage to Viet Cong, and then it would be followed by a second coup, which would create even more instability in South Vietnam. And that's exactly what happened. He was very prophetic. When we come back, how the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem unfolded. In the modern AI enterprise, adversaries no longer break in. They log in. As autonomous AI agents and machines gain privileged access, your risk is much greater than that of the CIA. Your risk is becoming invisible. And legacy tools can't keep up. 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And Lodge very disingenuously said, it's 4.30 in the morning in Washington. The U.S. government can't possibly have an attitude toward what's happening here in Saigon. Of course, Lodge knew exactly what the attitude of the U.S. government was. It was in favor of who it encouraged to do. But he didn't say that to Ziem. Instead, he praised Ziem's courage. He's praised his leadership of South Vietnam. He said, are you aware that the generals are offering you safe passage out of the country? And Ziem said, no, I'm not aware of that. And the conversation ended. Now, in breaking down elements of what happened during the coup, this CIA officer, Konan, was also involved at the general's headquarters, you write. He's wearing a U.S. Army uniform. He's helping them. But at the same time, he is also trying to help Ziem and his brother escape, trying to summon a plane from Okinawa to pick them up. Can you talk about that side of the situation? Right. The generals had told Konan to come to the coup headquarters, which was out near the airport, and to bring as much money with him as he could. So he showed up there with a bag full of three million piasters, which was the U.S. equivalent of about $42,000. The generals wanted that money to bribe any military commanders who were still sitting on the fence, and also to pay compensation to the families of rebel soldiers who were killed during the coup, or so they said. I'm not really sure what happened to that money, but Konan did show up with $42,000 in cash. And he was in their headquarters through the entire coup. He was radioing a stream of almost, you know, minute-by-minute reports to the U.S. embassy, which was then forwarding it to Washington. So everybody in Washington was aware of exactly what was happening. At one point toward the end of the coup, right before Ziem and his brother knew, Lui Konan for a plane, a U.S. aircraft, to get Ziem out of the country. And Lui Konan immediately called his boss, who was the acting station chief at the time, a gentleman by the name of David Smith, and said, do we have any aircraft we can use to get him out of here? And David Smith said the nearest long-range aircraft, which was the KC-135, was on Okinawa. It would take 24 hours to get it to Saigon. Of course, there were other aircraft there at the time. There were U.S. military aircraft that couldn't take him out. But Konan went back to the generals and said, you know, we can't get the KC-135 for at least a day. And those 24 hours would be crucial. Why couldn't another aircraft have been used? Right, absolutely. The generals responded. The coup leader, General Big Min, told Konan, we can't hold him that long. And Min, by the way, was the guy who later ordered the assassination of Ziem and Liu. But the U.S. didn't really make any preparations to evacuate Ziem. Ziem was a longtime ally of the United States. We were giving him all sorts of military and economic aid. You know, we did have the means to get him out of there. Nobody really offered it. Lodge later said that he offered his personal aircraft to Ziem. I didn't find any evidence of that whatsoever. And I'm not sure that even if we had offered Ziem a way out, that he would have gone. He was a very proud man, a very strong nationalist. He didn't like to have to rely on foreign governments for aid. And I'm not sure that even if there had been a way out for him, he would have taken it. I think that he was determined to talk to the generals, see if he could reach some sort of resolution with them. And unfortunately, they murdered him before he had a chance to do that. How did he and his brother end up being killed? Well, by the morning of November 2nd, they realized that no help was coming. From any loyal military people. So they called up the generals and said that they were ready to surrender. They put on suits. They went to a Catholic church in Cologne and the generals sent out a small convoy to pick them up. There were a couple of jeeps, just a handful of soldiers and an armored personnel carrier. And this convoy arrived at the church. They put Ziem and Mew in the back of the armored personnel carrier. They tied their hands behind their backs and then they murdered them. They didn't just kill them. They killed them. They killed them. They killed them. They killed them. They brutally butchered both of them. Mew was bayoneted more than 30 times. And then he was shot a couple of times for good measure. Ziem was shot in the back of the head a couple of times. And they'd been driven back to the general's headquarters. They opened up the armored personnel carriers and showed them the corpses. And the generals had won and overthrown the Ziem government. Why that level of brutality? Not clear to me. I think that the South Vietnamese army who, I believe, was responsible for the execution. There's one story that Mew had injured his wife. I'm not sure if that's a true story or not, but he was the one who bayoneted Mew over and over and over. Whether we're talking about the ambassador Lodge or co-named the CIA officer, did they foresee that Ziem was going to be assassinated? Or did they think that he ultimately would be able to take a plane out? Well, I think this was not good for the American government to be tied into these assassinations at all. President Kennedy liked Ziem. He admired Ziem. He had supported South Vietnam when he was a member of the U.S. Senate in the 50s. He had obviously given a lot of aid to Ziem's government. And he was genuinely shocked when Ziem and Mew were murdered. In the summer of 63, he told his aides that he hoped that no harm would come to them. If the U.S. government could do anything about it, he hoped that they would only be sent into exile outside the country somewhere. And during the meeting at the National Security Council in the White House, where he learned of the murders, there was an eyewitness there, General Maxwell Taylor, who said that Kennedy had jumped to his feet with a look of shock on his face that Taylor had never seen before and rushed out of the room. Kennedy understood that the U.S. government bore a measure of responsibility for what had happened during the coup. And I think he was genuinely upset by it. Ziem was buried in an unmarked grave. He was then moved decades later. Did any of the people who were involved in his ousting on the U.S. side express regret? Well, Kennedy did. I think he did express some regret, but it was private. I mean, he never expressed that publicly. I'm not aware that anybody else did express regret. A lodge leader said that he had tried to get Ziem out of Saigon on his own plane, but that didn't happen, which implies some level of regret. Some of the people who had opposed the coup were very upset by what had happened. And they realized that this was a boon to the Viet Cong. The communists in North Vietnam were delighted that Ziem had been killed. They thought he was a very strong nationalist leader. He was holding his army and his country together pretty well and giving them a hard time. They couldn't believe that the U.S. government had been as silly as to remove probably the toughest leader in South Vietnam. Another aspect of this story is the fact that on November 22nd, Kennedy himself is assassinated. How do both of these assassinations change the course of the war? Well, I think losing both of these leaders opened the door to much deeper U.S. involvement in the war The South Vietnam government was decapitated. It was left leaderless. The generals had promised to turn power over to a civilian government right after they took over. They immediately abrogated that promise, informed the junta, tried to run the government themselves. They were not very good at it. And they were ousted themselves by another general just three months later. And South Vietnam from that point forward started to just descend into chronic political stability. So the U.S. government took over the country, and the U.S. government, and the U.S. government began to take over the country. The U.S. The U.S. government going to send U.S. combat troops. Toward the end of his life, he actually announced that he intended to withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel from South Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the bulk of U.S. military personnel by 1965. Johnson was a different person, different personality. He had been to South Vietnam. He knew that it could turn into a quagmire. In fact, when he came back from his trip in 1961, he told Kennedy, you know, let's not get any more involved in this. Let's He postured as the peace candidate against Barry Goldwater. He said that he didn't want to escalate the war. He tried to keep the war on the back burner as much as he could during the campaign. But the world became a much more dangerous place at the end of 1964, right before the election. The Chinese detonated their first atomic bomb. The Soviets ousted Nikita Khrushchev as premier, and along with him, his policy of peaceful coexistence with the West. And I think most ominously, Ho Chi Minh started infiltrating North Vietnam's regular troops in the South, which was a very dangerous escalation of the war. And at that point, Johnson started listening harder to voices in the Pentagon who were urging him to send in U.S. combat troops and start bombing the North. Which then happens in 1965, two years after Kennedy said he would withdraw those troops who were advising. And that was a very dangerous escalation of the war that had been going on for a very long time. So I think there's a lot to say about that, and I think it's very important to think about that. I think it's very important to think about that, and I think it's very important to think about that in the context of the war. Well, I got involved in this because I was just very interested in the origins of the war. You know, the war is a very big thing. When I was a kid growing up, it was on the news every night. It was a newscast. It was a newscast. It was a newscast. I used to read the newspapers every day in the 60s and into the 70s. And the more I studied it, the more I focused on the coup, not just as a very interesting story to be told, historical story, but also as kind of a pivotal event in the war that opened the door to deeper U.S. involvement. And I think I did get to the bottom of how that happened. I may be mistaken. There may be other material that the government is still sitting on in a lot of fault. But I think I did get to the bottom of it. And the beginning quote in my book is from the novel, Mille Miserables. And it talks about how the greatest blunders are often made up of multiple strands. And I think that was definitely the case with this coup. It evolved over a period of time. There were all sorts of personalities, conflicts, misgivings, misunderstandings, miscommunications that fed into it. And the outcome was very bad for our country. Yeah. Yeah. And all those different strands came together into one very complicated knot. And I feel like in preparing for this interview, I was plagued by the what-ifs of what you uncovered. Jack, thank you so much for sharing your work with us. Thank you, Sasha, for your excellent questions. This was really a pleasure to do. Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. If you liked the episode, give us a follow. On Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And leave us a rating or review. It really helps. If you have any feedback or you want to hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycastatspymuseum.org. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber. And the show is brought to you by N2K Networks, Goat Rodeo, and the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. you