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US Intelligence and the Origins of The U.S. Intelligence and the Origins of the Vietnam War, 1962 - 1965 Yukiko Ochiai PhD in Politics, the University of Edinburgh, 2010 Abstract Analysing documents produced by the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon, the thesis examines the role of intelligence assessment in U.S. Vietnam policy during the period between December 1961 and February 1965. It investigates intelligence on the counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, on the intentions and capabilities of North Vietnam, and on the probable consequences of policy options. The first half of the thesis examines the Vietnam intelligence during the Kennedy administration, following the rise of optimism in 1962 and the intelligence dispute in 1963. The second half of the study explores intelligence developments from the fall of the Diem regime in November 1963 to President Johnson’s decision to take military action against North Vietnam in February 1965. The study suggests that intelligence deficiencies played a significant role in both the failure of counterinsurgency in the first half of the 1960s and in the decision for direct military intervention in 1965. The thesis also demonstrates that, rather than simply being a result of technical weaknesses, the lack of robust intelligence reflected wider problems of Vietnam policy, including political pressures, ideological contexts and the absence of strategic consensus. 1 Table of Contents Abbreviations Introduction 1. Introduction John F. Kennedy and the failure of counterinsurgency, 1962 - 1963 2. Counterinsurgency: Rise of Optimism, 1962 3. Counterinsurgency: Intelligence Disputes, 1963 4. Political Crisis, 1963 Lyndon Johnson and the decision for direct military intervention, 1964 - 1965 5. Rejecting Alternatives, November 1963 - March 1964 6. South Vietnam: Problems and Prospects, 1964 7. North Vietnam: Intentions, Capabilities and Probable Response, 1964 8. Choosing Air Strikes, April 1964 - February 1965 Conclusion 9. Conclusion Bibliography 2 Abbreviations AID Agency for International Development ARVN Army of the Republic of Vietnam BNE Bureau of National Estimates CAS Covert Action Staff CF Country File (the John F. Kennedy Library) CFV Country File, Vietnam (the Lyndon B. Johnson Library) CIA Central Intelligence Agency CREST CIA Records Search Tool DCI Director of Central Intelligence DDI Deputy Director for Intelligence DDP Deputy Director for Plans DI Directorate of Intelligence DIA Defense Intelligence Agency DP Directorate of Plans DRV Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the official name of North Vietnam) FBIS Foreign Broadcast Information Service FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States GVN Government of [South] Vietnam INR Bureau of Intelligence and Research JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff JKFL John F. Kennedy Library LBJL Lyndon B. Johnson Library MAAG Military Assistance Advisory Group MACV Military Assistance Command Vietnam NA National Archives NIE National Intelligence Estimate NLF National Liberation Front NSC National Security Council NSF National Security File OCI Office of Current Intelligence ONE Office of National Estimates PAVN People’s Army of Vietnam PPC Policy Planning Council PRC People’s Republic of China RVN Republic of Vietnam (the official name of South Vietnam) SNIE Special National Intelligence Estimate USIA United States Information Agency USOM United States Operations Mission USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics VC Viet Cong 3 Chapter 1 Introduction In his oft-quoted essay on Leo Tolstoy (“The Hedgehog and the Fox”), philosopher Isaiah Berlin uses a line by the Greek poet Archilochus – “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing" – to illustrate what he sees as “one of the deepest differences which divides writers and thinkers, and it may be, human beings in general.” On the one side of this “great chasm,” according to Berlin, are those “who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.” The intellectual lives of those on the other side, in contrast, are “centrifugal rather than centripetal.” Their minds are “scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.” 1 In studies of international politics, the aversion to a “fanatical, unitary inner vision” figures prominently in the writings of Classical Realists, who dominated the discipline in the mid-twentieth century. One of the defining features of political realism, according to William Wohlforth, is the primacy of the “dispassionate analysis” of the security situation based on a “deep familiarity with specific players involved in each situation, their history, culture, and collective mindsets.” 2 Political realism, in this interpretation, is first and foremost against dogma, prejudice, wishful thinking and other forms of cognitive psychological hazards that can obstruct one’s ability to see the world as it is and in all its complexity. 3 It is on this basis that Hans Morgenthau – one of the most influential Classical Realists of the twentieth century – opposed the Vietnam War. In April 1965, he criticised the U.S. government for using the simple juxtaposition of “Communism” and “free world” as the guiding framework of its Vietnam policy, when the growing division within the Communist bloc (symbolized by Tito’s 1 Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London: Penguin, 1957), p. 22. 2 William Wohlforth, “Realism and Foreign Policy,” in Steven Smith, Amelia Hadfield, and Time Dunne eds., Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), p. 40. 3 For various traditions and interpretations of realism, see for example: Duncan Bell, “Introduction” in Duncan Bell ed., Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Benjamin Frankel ed., Roots of Realism (London: Frank Cass, 1996); Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since Machiavelli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 4 Yugoslavia and the Sino-Soviet split) and the rise of neutralism in Asia and Africa had diminished the validity of such dualism. He argued that, by sticking to that binary framework, Washington had manoeuvred itself into a “position which is anti-revolutionary per se and which requires military opposition to revolution wherever it is found in Asia, regardless of how it affects the interests – and how susceptible it is to the power – of the United States.” He stressed that “For better or for worse, we live again in an age of revolution. It is the task of statesmanship not to oppose what cannot be opposed without a chance of success, but to bend it to one’s own interests.” Politics, Morgenthau added a month later, is “the art of the possible. There are certain things that you would like to do but you can’t do because you haven’t got the means to do them.” 4 In Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal (1967), historian Howard Zinn also criticises the way of thinking and general assumptions underlying the Vietnam policy. At the beginning of the book, he emphasises: What we bring to the common body of evidence in Vietnam – the perspective we have – is critical. It determines what we choose to see or not to see. It determines how we relate the things we see. This perspective varies from one person to another. I think we get closer to wisdom, and also to democracy, when we add the perspectives of other people to our own. In the rest of the book, Zinn clarifies factors that in his view had been obscured or distorted in the government’s justification for its Vietnam policy. He argues, for instance, that, rather than standing up to “communist aggression from the North,” the U.S. government was fighting insurgents who were estimated to be more than 80 percent South Vietnamese. Like Morgenthau, Zinn also questions the domino theory, arguing that the United States had to “get accustomed to the idea that there will be more Communist countries in the world and that this is not necessarily bad.” This is because “Communist nations in their international affairs behave very much like other nations,” and they were “as prone to the emotion of nationalism as other nations: they crave independence and resist domination by any other nation, whether capitalist or Communist.” Paranoia, he points out, “starts from a base of 5 facts, but then leaps wildly to a conclusion.” 4 Morgenthau quoted in William Wohlforth, “Realism and Foreign Policy,” in Steven Smith, Amelia Hadfield, and Time Dunne eds., Foreign Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), pp. 40-41. For Morgenthau’s view on Vietnam policy, see also: Hans Morgenthau, Vietnam and the United States (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1965); Hans Morgenthau, Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade 1960–70 (London: Paul Mall, 1970), pp. 398–425. 5 Howard Zinn, Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal (Cambridge: South End Press, 1967), pp. 1, 3-4, 90, 101-102. 5 In the article “The End of Either/Or” published in the same year (1967), McGeorge Bundy levels a similar stricture not against the Johnson administration (for which he served as the national security advisor until 1966) but against “debaters” of the Vietnam policy outside the U.S. government. Insisting that nothing about Vietnam was simple, Bundy argues: [W]hat has made debate so easy, and action so hard, in Viet Nam is that the debater can defend the propositions he likes from a great pile of evidence in which there is plenty to support every view. In our actions, however, we have to live with the whole. He acknowledges that the Vietnam conflict involved both aggression from the North and civil conflict within the South, both corruption and self-sacrifice in the US-backed regime in Saigon, and both anti-communist feeling and a lack of affection towards the central government on the part of the South Vietnamese people.
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