US Internal Security Assistance to South Vietnam

Insurgency, Subversion and Public Order

William Rosenau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415369985
• eBook ISBN: 9781134200658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This new study of American support to the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam illuminates many contemporary events and foreign policies.

During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, the United States used foreign police and paramilitary assistance to combat the spread of communist revolution in the developing world. This became the single largest internal security programme during the neglected 1955-1963 period. Yet despite presidential attention and a sustained campaign to transform Diem's police and paramilitary forces into modern, professional services, the United States failed to achieve its objectives.

Given the scale of its efforts, and the Diem regime's importance to the US leadership, this text identifies the three key factors that contributed to the failure of American policy. First, the competing conceptions of Diem's civilian and military advisers. Second, the reforms advanced by US police training personnel were also at odds with the political agenda of the South Vietnamese leader. Finally, the flawed beliefs among US police advisers based on the universality of American democracy.

This study also shows how notions borrowed from academic social science of the time became the basis for building Diem's internal security forces.

This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of intelligence studies, Cold War studies, security studies, US foreign policy and the Vietnam War in general.

1 Eisenhower, US foreign internal security assistance and the struggle for the developing world

Introduction

Countering Soviet advances in the developing world was an urgent priority for the Eisenhower administration. The primary threat, in the administration’s view, was not military conquest by what Washington called the ‘Sino-Soviet bloc’. Rather, as Allen Dulles, director of central intelligence and the brother of John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, explained at the meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) on 11 April 1957, ‘the most dangerous problem was that of Communist subversion’.¹ Early in his administration, Eisenhower initiated a sophisticated counter-subversive campaign aimed at helping friendly governments build the capacity to secure themselves against internal threats identified as communist or communist-supported.

Assisting foreign police and paramilitary forces were an important component of Washington’s policy for defending threatened regimes. Although the United States had supported foreign internal security forces in the past, two aspects of the Eisenhower program were new. First, assistance to foreign police and paramilitary forces during the middle and late 1950s was conducted in the context of the Cold War, and was aimed explicitly at countering communist penetration. Second, earlier US assistance had been supplied on a limited and ad hoc basis. Under Eisenhower, supporting foreign police and paramilitary forces became an established part of US national security policy.

The foreign internal security assistance program had multiple objectives, and contained elements of foreign aid, military assistance, diplomacy, propaganda, and intelligence. Helping local governments build the capacity for identifying and neutralizing communists and their supporters was a central task, as was developing forces for suppressing strikes, riots, and other violent unrest. Strong internal security forces were also considered important for economic growth and stability and national development. Meeting these goals, Washington hoped, would serve the larger purpose of conserving US national resources for the long struggle against international communism.

Washington’s plan for meeting these objectives seemed sound – shore up relatively low-cost indigenous police and paramilitary units to prevent communist advances and in so doing, forestall the commitment of US combat forces. But the program encountered serious bureaucratic and organizational problems as it was being implemented. Critics of the program would later charge that it was a victim of the Eisenhower administration’s neglect and under-funding. Yet neither Eisenhower nor his critics ever asked, let alone answered, the difficult question of how much spending was in fact required to provide for sufficient foreign internal security.

Eisenhower’s New Look policy

The death of Josef Stalin in March 1953 offered the promise of a reduction in Cold War tensions. Georgi Malenkov, a member of the collective leadership that assumed power after Stalin, indicated that the Soviet Union would henceforth pursue ‘peaceful coexistence and competition’ with the West, and Moscow launched a peace offensive to convince the world that Moscow had ameliorated the more aggressive and expansionist aspects of its foreign policy.² Eisenhower eventually concluded that the new Soviet approach was largely rhetorical, and that Moscow remained committed to world domination. However, another event later that year convinced the president that important changes in the East–West relationship were inevitable. On 12 August, the Soviet Union detonated its first hydrogen bomb, and with both superpowers now possessing nuclear weapons, a direct military confrontation between the two powers carried with it the possibility of global annihilation. Competition between East and West would remain the dominant feature of international politics, in Eisenhower’s view, but it would be carried out in the context of what John Lewis Gaddis has termed ‘a framework of co-existence’, in which each side was careful not to provoke the other in ways that could lead to overt war.³ However, the president’s assessment by no means implied an American policy of passivity. The administration was determined to regain the initiative in the Cold War, which they believed had been lost during the Truman administration.⁴

Despite what in retrospect was clearly a global preponderance of American economic and military strength, the US leadership was haunted by the specter of American vulnerability.⁵ In Eisenhower’s judgement, the United States would ultimately prevail over international communism, but only after a protracted period of global competition. As the president informed the members of the NSC on 8 December 1955, ‘we are playing this game of trying to outwit the Russians on something like a 40-year basis’.⁶ Conserving American resources for this long period of competitive co-existence was central to Eisenhower’s national security strategy. In the judgement of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, it was essential to avoid committing US troops to costly and unwinnable ground conflicts like the one the United States had endured recently in Korea. The administration’s New Look security policy, as articulated in October 1953, stated that the United States would employ a range of instruments in a flexible fashion to exploit Soviet weaknesses while conserving American resources.⁷ The New Look outlined a division of labor between the United States and its international partners.⁸ General war, it was hoped, would be deterred by US nuclear weapons. Local conflicts would be the responsibility of America’s allies, supported by US military assistance and economic assistance and backed up by the US nuclear weapons and naval and air power.⁹ Security agreements among the United States and its allies formed an important part of the New Look policy. Indeed, Eisenhower and Dulles earned a reputation for what was termed ‘pactomania’.¹⁰ Alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) were expected to help deter the Soviet Union and its allies, and to reduce US military manpower costs by relying on allies to provide troops to respond to local aggression. Under the New Look strategy, the United States used its own non-military tools to thwart Soviet advances. The Eisenhower approach went beyond simply reacting to Soviet thrusts. Rather, as part of the long-term campaign to undermine Moscow’s stated goal of global domination, the administration policy emphasized the proactive use of foreign aid, covert intelligence activities, and propaganda to keep Moscow off balance.¹¹

The superpowers and the developing world

During the Eisenhower presidency, the developing world assumed a new importance in US national security policy. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union had largely ignored what Washington termed the ‘underdeveloped areas’, but after the death of the Soviet leader, Moscow embarked on a campaign to extend its influence in what it had once considered to be peripheral regions.¹² Given the potentially suicidal consequences of a direct military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the latter, in Washington’s view, was now pursuing the superpower conflict indirectly through the developing world.¹³ ‘World communism’ the Operations Coordinating Board (OCB) concluded in October 1955, ‘prefers to expand by means other than direct military aggression’.¹⁴

The collapse of the French position in Indochina during 1954 reinforced the administration’s perception that communism was on the march in the Third World.¹⁵ Moscow’s post-Stalin economic offensive in the developing world added to Washington’s concern. Increased trade, grants, loans, technology and other blandishments helped fuel the administration’s belief that Soviet Union was attempting to lure the newly emerged, post-colonial nations into the communist orbit.¹⁶ Decisionmakers like the secretary of state feared that citizens of poor countries might choose the Soviet system in the hopes that it would deliver a better way of life.¹⁷ The administration’s sense of alarm about Moscow’s appeal was well founded. As Robert J. McMahon has noted, ‘[m]any Third World leaders and intellectuals both admired and sought to emulate the Soviet developmental model’, which in the course of only a few decades transformed a Eurasian backwater into a global power.¹⁸

Eisenhower believed that political instability, poverty, and nationalism in the Third World made it ripe for communist exploitation.¹⁹ ‘Nationalism is on the march’, Eisenhower recorded in his diary in January 1953, ‘and world Communism is taking advantage of that spirit of nationalism to cause dissention [sic] in the free world’.²⁰ The Soviet Union aggressively supported ‘liberation’ movements through what the communists termed ‘active measures’ – propaganda, the creation of front groups, and the manipulation of international forums.²¹ Moscow could also draw on the resources of the international communist movement. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in November 1956 caused many Western communists to leave the party.²² In much of the rest of the world, however, communists remained highly motivated by what Tony Smith has called ‘a millenarian or chiliastic faith, whereby the force of change in the Third World would sweep all before it elsewhere’.²³

The Eisenhower administration believed that the Soviet Union and its satellites, together with communist China, formed a single, unified force working to subvert governments friendly to the West.²⁴ The Korean war suggested that the communist powers posed a significant danger when they worked together, and American national security officials spoke frequently of supposedly monolithic ‘Sino-Soviet bloc’. In fact, during the middle and late 1950s, Moscow and Beijing were growing increasingly estranged, driven apart by ideological disputes and differences over tactics in dealing with the West.²⁵ Eisenhower recognized that the relationship was inherently unstable. As the president told the NSC on 18 August 1954, ‘history did seem to indicate that when two dictatorships become too large and powerful, jealousies between them spring up’.²⁶ Yet the administration overestimated the durability of the Sino-Soviet alliance. Washington operated under the assumption that Moscow and Beijing were co-operating closely, and as late as January 1959, Dulles remained convinced that there were ‘no early prospects’ for a rupture between the two communist powers.²⁷

Meeting the subversive challenge

The conviction that Moscow and its allies were working to undermine non-communist regimes in the developing world led Washington to develop a program of counter-subversive assistance. The Eisenhower administration never offered an explicit definition of the term ‘subversion’. In the administration’s use of the word, subversion connoted the use of propaganda, front groups, and political agitation to penetrate and then disrupt or suborn government ministries, political parties, the press, trade unions, and education.²⁸ In the administration’s judgement, most Third World governments lacked the knowledge, resources, and training to defend themselves against subversion.²⁹ John Foster Dulles told his Australian counterpart, R.G. Casey in October 1954 that the United States was a neophyte when it came to fighting communist subversion overseas.³⁰ But soon, the United States, faced with a seemingly implacable adversary who operated clandestinely and subversively, began sharpening all of the political, military, psychological, and economic weapons in its Cold War arsenal.

Foreign assistance under Eisenhower

Eisenhower regarded foreign aid as a key instrument in the campaign to immunize the developing world against communism. The president directed US foreign assistance away from Western European countries, which were now expected to be self-sufficient, to newly emerged countries such as Taiwan, Pakistan and South Vietnam.³¹ Although he was initially sceptical about its utility, the president came to support foreign assistance wholeheartedly after developments such as the founding of the non-aligned movement in 1955 and the 1956 Suez crisis.³² While some scholars have detected a strong moralistic component to Eisenhower’s support for increased foreign aid to the developing world,³³ his motivation was in fact more pragmatic.

The purpose of foreign aid under Eisenhower was three-fold. First, it was designed to contribute to the stability of non-communist regimes as part of a broader campaign of psychological, political, and economic warfare against the communist bloc.³⁴ Second, the United States hoped foreign assistance would ameliorate misery and want in the developing world, thereby deterring the Soviets from exploiting these countries. As Eisenhower warned the Congress on 21 May 1957, ‘[u]nless these people [of the developing world] can hope for reasonable economic advance, the danger will be acute that their governments will be subverted by communism’.³⁵ Finally, it was hoped foreign aid would help convince the Third World of the superiority of Western political and economic models. ‘[I]t is vital’, Eisenhower told the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee on 23 July 1953, ‘that the people see evidence of improved conditions of living flowing from freedom and independent sovereignty as contrasted to totalitarian methods’.³⁶

Truman had ushered in the modern era of US foreign assistance during his 1949 inaugural address, when he outlined a series of economic and technical assistance measures (later dubbed the ‘Point Four’ programs) that were intended, in his words, to ‘strengthen freedom-loving nations against the dangers of aggression’. The United States, said Truman, was ‘pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques’, which should be made available to help all ‘peace-loving peoples … realize their aspirations for a better life’.³⁷ Congress responded with legislation that gave the president the authority to provide military, technical and economic assistance to nations facing external and internal communist threats.³⁸ In 1951, Congress abolished the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), which had administered the Marshall Plan for post-war European recovery and other foreign aid, and consolidated military aid, economic assistance, and technical cooperation into a single Mutual Security Program (MSP)³⁹. The MSP was overseen by the Mutual Security Agency (MSA), a body under the jurisdiction of the executive office of the president. Military assistance, such as the procurement and delivery of weapons and equipment, and the training of foreign military personnel, was carried out by the Department of Defense (DOD), while the provision of foreign aid became a responsibility of the State Department. In August 1953, Eisenhower created a new independent agency, the Foreign Operations Administration (FOA) to carry out all foreign aid. The administration of military assistance remained a Pentagon responsibility, subject to FOA’s br...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Eisenhower, US foreign internal security assistance and the struggle for the developing world
• 2 Shoring up America’s man: The origins of police and paramilitary assistance to South Vietnam, 1954–6
• 3 The struggle for reform: The United States and Diem’s internal security forces, 1956–8
• 4 Competing conceptions: The United States, Diem and the Civil Guard, 1955–61
• 5 John F. Kennedy, foreign internal security assistance, and the challenge of ‘subterranean war’
• 6 ‘Ridiculous representatives of Mr Diem’: Paramilitary forces and the Strategic Hamlet Program, 1961–3
• 7 American universalism and the ‘triumph of technique’: The Kennedy administration and civilian police reform in South Vietnam
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Intelligence documents denied under the Freedom of Information Act
• Notes
• Bibliography