Leaving Vietnam: The One Man We Remembered
Marks, John D.
Leaving Vietnam: The One Man We Remembered by John D. Marks Even as Saigon was about to fall, Walt Whitman Rostow seemed determined to be the last hawk; he called for the use of American...
...Most Vietnamese who were unable or unwilling to leave Vietnam and who feel themselves endangered by the new government will be likely to try to blend into the general population...
...ment whether the system had been destroyed or removed...
...I asked the State Depart...
...Many people say the Americans don’t know how to use their foreign aid...
...Lansdale believed that Vietnamese who had been involved in unsavory activity “wouldn’t continue that here...
...Only the Vietnamese would know...
...The Americans seemed to be very friendly to their employees...
...Now they run a big home construction firm in France, and apparently they’re very successful...
...These flights and their passengers were to a large extent ignored by the press, which focused primarily on the more chaotic movement of American dependents and those Vietnamese who at times tried to storm their way out...
...Any tendency I have to be judgmental is tempered by my own friendship with “Nguyen Van Danh,” who was my interpreter in Vietnam eight years ago...
...Since few corrupt or brutal Vietnamese were ever tried by the Thieu regime, only a handful of the more than 100,000 evacuees fall into this criminal class...
...By the time I arrived in Vietnam in 1966, Danh ‘was the head Vietnamese employee in a rather large AID office...
...I will personally vouch for him...
...A State Department official, who himself left Saigon on a refugee flight, estimated that somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 of the evacuees fell into what he called the “VIP” category...
...Since he was supporting a wife, three children, and his father, who had been forced off the plantation by Viet Cong threats, he had to take a significant cut in his standard of living...
...The danger was probably felt most sharply by the tens of thousands who had been connected with the CIA in the secret police, Phoenix, and counter-terrorist programs, (The evacuees apparently included a disproportionately high share of CIAsponsored Vietnamese because the CIA was reportedly the most effective in the bureaucratic infighting within the U. S. government as each agency tried to bring out the maximum number of...
...3ne of our gifts was a national identification card system which allowed the Thieu government to record all its citizens’ fingerprints in 1 giant computerized network...
...It was the U. S. government which made life possible for the Thieu regime, and our officials were not blind to the kind of government they were supporting...
...In 1966, the CIA became concerned about the public relations impact of the word “terror,’’ and the program was renamed Provincial Reconnaissance Unit...
...A Catholic, Danh even believed in one of our gods...
...Danh was redrafted, but with a carefully placed bribe he managed to get assigned back to his old job as an American interpreter-now in uniform and at greatly reduced pay...
...But he had to leave after three years in the seminary because his family could not afford to keep him there, and he found work as a typist on a rubber plantation...
...In any case, as State Department refugee coordinator L. Dean Brown has admitted, the United States cannot under international law forcibly repatriate thoseeven ex-convicts-seeking political asylum...
...Paid directly by the Agency and largely outside the Saigon government’s control, they were supposed to turn the terror tactics of the other side against the other side...
...These were “our” Vietnamese-the cabinet ministers, military officers, intelligence agents, U. S. employees, and intellectuals, who for one reason or another had wedded themselves to the American effort in Vietnam...
...He followed us, he did everything we said he should, he believed in us, and by his standards we let him down...
...If the VC shows cooperation, we don’t kill him I f he doesn’t cooperate, we torture him It’s part of the war...
...According to Lansdale’s description, in the Pentagon Papers, his associates included high Vietnamese officials he had manipulated, secret policemen he had trained, and propagandists he had used to spread false information...
...After the Tet offensive of 1968, at American insistence, South Vietnam finally mobilized all males under 40 not rich enough to buy a deferment...
...Since I knew that Danh could never have saved that much cash on his PRU salary, I asked him how he intended to raise the $1,000...
...The PRG would call Danh an American “lackey,” and according to their definitions that was certainly true...
...Yet, I don’t want to see him hurt because I care about him and because I think my country has a responsibility toward him...
...It was a chance to advance...
...They just gave it to the Vietnamese government and let them spend it...
...If I get VC money, I use it myself Danh never got his chance, however, because the PRU commander refused to wait for the bribe and forced Danh to resign...
...So I believe we should welcome Danh to this country, if he got out...
...They tried hard to get the Vietnamese troops to do the job...
...I could have my wife open a business like feeding troops in a mess hall, Another way is to set an ambush against VC financial cadre and keep the money...
...They were not so much the people who had suffered from the war’s terrible destruction but those who had prospered from it...
...Staying behind would have put most in some form of jeopardy-if not for their lives, certainly for their liberty...
...He decided the Americans offered his best chance for the future, and he started to study English at his own expense...
...According to an American who has worked closely with Lansdale, “It really took some maneuvering back here to get someone out like [former National Police chief] Pham Van Lieu, who was out of favor with the [Thieu] government...
...And they were the very people who had failed-in the Pentagon’s now abandoned phrase-to “hack it” under Vietnamization...
...Furthermore, before anyone suggests that Vietnamese guilty of war crimes be brought to justice in the U. S . , it should be remembered that it was our government which conceived and paid for the “neutralizations” under Phoenix, the “provincial interrogation centers,” and the whole secret police apparatus...
...its own employees and con tact s.) When asked about the immigration of these former intelligence operatives to the United States, Lansdale said, “I know of similar Vietnamese who went out with the French in 1954, and they are very constructive citizens over there...
...I have no idea what happened to Danh, but I hope he managed to get out of Vietnam...
...He felt a responsibility toward these people as he did for more ordinary folks he had known in Vietnam-secretaries, widows, opposition leaders, and a folk singer named Pham Duy...
...That was where I last saw him five months before the fall of Saigon...
...I think for sure that they all welcome this as a chance to change their lives, and I have to admit they are a thoroughly skilled lot who will take to peaceful endeavors quite easily...
...I only hope that General Lansdale is right in saying they will “take to peaceful endeavors quite easily" John D. Marks is co-author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence...
...And as distasteful as I find some of the other “VIP” evacuees, I believe we must accept them as well...
...All during April, the now-retired Lansdale used longestablished contacts in Washington, the Philippines, and Saigon to help evacuate as many Vietnamese as possible from their homeland...
...After only a few weeks on the job, a new Vietnamese PRU corn inander was appointed in Saigon, and Danh was summoned back to headquarters...
...I have no doubt we never should have promised him anything in the first place, but we did...
...While the Vietnamese have been ising violent tactics against each 3ther and foreign enemies for thousands of years, the United States brought sophisticated technology to the country and made the killing considerably more efficient...
...Danh did well in the administrative side of the PRU program...
...The main job of the PRU is to annihilate, to neutralize the VC infrastructure...
...In fact, embassy officials at the highest level repeatedly failed to take action on documented cases of corruption among “our” Vietnamese...
...Saigon’s operatives may have reached levels of brutality that violated the sensibilities of their American “advisors,” but it would be grossly unfair to put the Vietnamese alone in the docket...
...He hated the Viet Cong, who had harrassed his family on the plantation, but he also had no love for the Thieu government...
...On a very personal level, you worried about the Vietnamese you had known and liked, whose lives might or might not be in danger...
...He served as a State Department advisor to the Vietnam government from 1966 to 1970...
...500,000 Americans coming in created bad attitudes...
...The PRUs were established by the CIA in 1965 under the name “Counter-terror Teams...
...Then the American troops came here, and that was another problem...
...The Americans gave too much money to Vietnam...
...He should have known better than to get involved with the PRUs, but he didn’t...
...Eventually, in 1971, he was named head PRU operative in an important provincial capital...
...Other Americans who had served in Vietnam also took matters into their own hands and made the dangerous trip back to Saigon to save some of their friends...
...he called for the use of American military power to “save” Vietnam...
...With the Americans, I learned many new things, and I really got advanced...
...He was told that he would have to pay the new man about $1,000 to hold on to his position...
...Lieu eventually was put aboard one of the special planes the U. S. embassy used to evacuate Vietnamese it felt would be targets of the PRG...
...Without his “bac” he felt he would never rise very high in the French-run plantation, nor would he ever get a good job with the Saigon government...
...Nor are the reports that some other of the CIA’s Cubans now apply their clandestine skills to the domestic drug trade...
...I know of one group who were terrific commando types-rebels at heart...
...The only way the PRG will be able to systematically identify such people hidden among the millions of uprooted war victims is to put the American identification network back intc service...
...At 17, Danh entered training for the priesthood- a calling which he was well aware would have lifted him several notches above his carpenterfather on the social scale...
...That’s why Vietnam got corrupted...
...General Edward Lansdale, who had been the prototype for both The Ugly American and The Quiet American, was extremely concerned...
...He swore he had no intention of raising it by shaking down the local population as the PRUs, brandishing their CIAfurnished weapons, frequently did...
...But if you were someone like me, who had lived in Vietnam, your thoughts probably had little to do with re-escalation, geopolitics, or solidarity with the revolutionary forces...
...We kidnap the VCand make interrogation to find out some more information...
...I could use my position for many things...
...More than the French, who wanted to be the bosses all the time...
...He was making over $200 a month, which put him well into the middle class, and he was one of the few U. S. government interpreters I ever met who could really speak and understand English...
...We talked at length about his life: I quit working jor the French to get promoted...
...While Rostow’s appeal was rejected, Henry Kissinger, his successor as national security advisor to the President, worked feverishly to minimize the damage that the impending defeat would cause American foreign policy...
...It’s unconventional warfare...
...Eager to better himself, he took a correspondence course to finish high school, but he was still unable to pass the all-important baccalaureate exam...
...He didn’t have the money but promised he would pay within two months...
...Countless others who were on embassy evacuation lists-or thought they should be-were left behind...
...An offica: spokesman replied, “We don’t know...
...Meanwhile, anti-war leader Fred Branfman rejoiced in the victories of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) as he scurried frantically around Washington in a last unnecessary effort to lobby against the United States becoming reinvolved in the war...
...After three years of army service as an interpreter, Danh found a job with the U. S. Agency for International Developmen t. I saw Danh again in Vietnam in December 1974, the day before I was arrested in Saigon and then expelled from the country as a “blacklisted journalist...
...He had been the CIA’S top Saigon operative in better days, and he told me in May how he had “turned to everyone [he] could think of to rescue” his former associates...
...The Americans, for sure, did not want South Vietnam to be communist...
...He had all those qualities- honesty, straight forwardness, efficiency, ambition-which Americans so much wanted to see in the Vietnamese...
...Thus, eight months later he jumped at the opportunity to join the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs...
...The example of the CIA’s Cubans whom the White House recycled into plumbers is not comforting...
...He commiserated with his American bosses about the inertia and corruption of the Saigon government, and he sincerely hoped that the Americans would magically transform his country into ajust and prosperous society...
...For the rest ‘of us, Lansdale’s assurances may be less than satisfactory...
...Administration spokesmen have told Congress that unless Vietnamese refugees have been convicted of a crime they will be admitted to the United States...
...He picked up a draft-deferrable job with the government and then went to work as an interpreter for the International Commission for Control and Supervision, the body set up by the 1973 Paris accords to supervise the peace that was not at hand...
...With his PRU service, Danh certainly will be a criminal in the eyes of the PRG-and by the standards of the Geneva convention...
...The tactics did not change...
Vol. 7 • June 1975 • No. 4
