US Intelligence and the Origins of the Vietnam War, 1962

163 Pages·2011·1.08 MB·English

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

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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
facts, but then leaps wildly to a conclusion.”5

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.
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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. “The internal complexities are matched internationally.” While Vietnam
was a test case of communist revolutionary doctrine, a victory for Ho Chi Minh
would not mean automatic communisation of all Asia, because “The lines of
influence and concern stretch out in all direction, but almost never in simple and
straightforward terms.” For the Vietnam policy, Bundy concludes, “the only
general proposition that seems valid is that sweeping and simple views are useful
only for those who do not have responsibility.”6
How, then, did decision makers responsible for the Vietnam policy actually
understand the complexity of the Vietnam conflict and its international context?
How and to what extent did their successes and failures in “dispassionate analysis”
and the “art of the possible” influence the country’s growing involvement in the
Vietnam conflict?
This study addresses these questions through the examination of intelligence
assessment, which, in the U.S. system, is expected to be one of the primary sources
of objective, fact-based analysis of foreign affairs. It starts with President
Kennedy’s decision to increase the U.S. support for the South Vietnamese
government (GVN) in December 1961 and ends with President Johnson’s
authorisation of air strikes against North Vietnam in February 1965. It analyses
intelligence products on the counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, on the intentions
and capabilities of North Vietnam and on the probable consequences of policy
options (such as the regime change in 1963 and the military action against North
Vietnam in 1965).

6 McGeorge Bundy, “The End of Either/Or,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 45, no. 2 (Jan 1967), pp.
191, 194-195.
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The thesis demonstrates that, although assessments were not entirely
unsuccessful, intelligence-related weaknesses did play an important role in the
failure of counterinsurgency during the first half of the 1960s and in the decision
for direct military intervention in 1965. It also shows that, rather than merely a
cause of policy failures, the lack of robust intelligence was in part a result of
broader problems of Vietnam policy, which include the absence of strategic
consensus, the political pressure to reject criticism, and the ideological context of
U.S. foreign policy in the 1960s.
Through the analysis of diverse challenges in the realms of intelligence and
intelligence-policy relations, the study also suggests that, in the face of a complex,
unpredictable policy issue like Vietnam, the realist ideal of adept statesmanship
based on shrewd, objective assessment can be far more difficult for policymakers
to achieve than some advocates of political realism seem to assume.

1. Intelligence assessment and the origins of the Vietnam War

Intelligence assessment in the historiography of the Vietnam War
The literature on the origins of the Vietnam War has extended its scope steadily
during the last five decades. The subjects that have already been examined
extensively include, for example, the advisory mechanism in the U.S. government,
the domestic political considerations of President Johnson, and the decisions made
on the “other side,” which included the National Liberation Front (NLF), North
Vietnam, China and the USSR.7 Despite this expansion in the scope of research,
however, the misperceptions and miscalculations on the part of the U.S.
government remain a central issue of the Vietnam historiography.
In the view of many historians and commentators who support the
“orthodox” interpretation of the Vietnam War, a series of flawed perceptions was a
major cause of what they regard as a policy blunder in 1965. They argue that the
strategic significance of Vietnam was exaggerated in the framework of the domino
theory, which predicted that a U.S. defeat in South Vietnam would be followed by
the spread of communist influence in Southeast Asia and/or other parts of the

7 For the debates over the origins of the Vietnam War, see for example: Jeffrey Kimball,
ed., To Reason Why: The Debate about the Causes of U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990); Mark Gilbert ed., Why the North Won the Vietnam War
(New York: Palgrave, 2002) “Introduction”; Larry Berman and Stephen Routh, “Why the
United States Fought in Vietnam,” Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 6 (2003); Kevin
Ruane, “Putting America in its Place? Recent Writing on the Vietnam Wars,” Journal of
Contemporary History, vol. 37, no. 1 (2002); Garry Hess, Vietnam: Explaining America’s
Lost War (Malden: Blackwell, 2009).
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developing world.8 Similarly, the Cold War rhetoric of dividing the world between
communist enemies and non-communist friends is often cited as a reason why
policymakers in Washington could not fully appreciate the nationalist drive behind
the NLF. The lack of basic knowledge has also been seen as a major source of
misjudgements. “First,” Gen. Maxwell Taylor (Ambassador to South Vietnam
1964–1965) later admitted in an interview, “we didn’t know ourselves. We thought
we were going into another Korean War, but this was a different country. Secondly,
we didn’t know our South Vietnamese allies. We never understood them…and we
knew even less about North Vietnam…So, until we know the enemy and know our
allies and know ourselves, we’d better keep out of this dirty kind of business.”9
In contrast, the revisionists, who regard the war as a necessary, winnable and
generally honourable effort by the United States, appear to reject (except for some
isolated misjudgements related to military strategy and tactics) that there were
fundamental flaws and weaknesses in the government’s perceptions.10 They argue
that the possible domino effect after the fall of South Vietnam was a real threat to
U.S. national security, rather than an illusion created by an erroneous application of
the domino theory. Michael Lind, for example, maintains that a communist victory
in South Vietnam in the mid-1960s was likely to be “followed by a minor regional
domino effect and a major global revolutionary wave effect…Once the Vietnam
War is viewed in the context of the Cold War, it looks less like a tragic error than
like a battle that could have hardly be avoided.”11 The revisionists’ central
assertion that the war was clearly winnable also implies that the U.S. government
had at least a basic knowledge and cognitive capacity robust enough to carry out
counterinsurgency and nation building effectively.
In recent decades, some historians who share the orthodox, negative view of
the Vietnam War have also questioned the importance of the domino theory and
cognitive problems. In The Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the
Road to War in Vietnam (1995), Gareth Porter suggests that the central thread in

8 For the debate over the soundness of the Domino Theory see: Garry Hess, Vietnam:
Explaining America’s Lost War (Malden: Blackwell, 2009), Chapter 2 “A Necessary War or
a Mistaken War?”
9 As quoted in David Elliott, “Official History, Revisionist History, and Wild History,” in
Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young eds., Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National,
and Transnational Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 281.
10 For revisionist works, see: David Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet: U.S.-Vietnam in
Perspective (San Rafael: Presidio Press, 1978); Bruce Palmer, The 25-Year War (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1984); Richard Nixon, No More Vietnam (London: White
Allen, 1986); Phillip Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1946-75 (London: Sidgwick
1988); Harry Summers, On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context (Navato: Presidio Press,
1982); Michael Lind, Vietnam: the Necessary War (New York: Freo Press, 1999); Mark
Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2006).
11 Michael Lind, Vietnam: the Necessary War, pp. 38, 256.
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Washington’s geopolitical calculations was the relative weaknesses of China and
the USSR (that is, a perceived “imbalance of power” in America’s favour) rather
than the vulnerability of the U.S. position in Southeast Asia (the fear of a domino
effect).12 Frederic Logevall goes further and dismisses the significance of
misperception itself. In his highly acclaimed book Choosing War: the Lost Chance
for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (1999) and in his more recent
essays (2004, 2008), Logevall criticises what he regards as the “if only we had
known” excuse of the earlier literature. “Policy makers in Washington,” he insists,
“generally had a sound grasp of the situation on the ground in South Vietnam, and
the thinking in Hanoi…the widely repeated assertion – by former officials and
many scholars – that American decision makers did not know what they were
getting into in Vietnam, cannot withstand close scrutiny. They had a sound grasp of
what they were up against.”13
In the light of all these arguments, it is remarkable that intelligence
assessment – a central element of the government’s perceptions and calculations –
remains almost entirely absent from the mainstream debates on the origins of the
Vietnam War. With some exceptions (notably the alleged manipulation of
intelligence during the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 196414) the quality and
role of intelligence rarely receive more than a passing reference in the general
studies of the war’s origins. The question of how intelligence materials (that is, the
thousands of reports and analyses produced each year to assist Vietnam policy)
influenced policymakers’ understanding of the conflict during the year leading to
the military escalation in 1965 largely remains a missing dimension in the general
debates on the Vietnam War.
This omission can partly be explained by the fragmentary and conflicting
accounts emerging from the existing literature on Vietnam intelligence. In fact, the

12 Gareth Porter, The Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in
Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California, 2005).
13 Fredrik Logevall, “Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol.
34 (2004), pp. 105-106. See also: Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: the Lost Chance for
Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkley: University of California Press,
1999); Fredrik Logevall, The Origins of the Vietnam War (New York: Longman, 2001);
Fredrik Logevall, “‘There Ain't No Daylight’: Lyndon Johnson and the Politics of
Escalation,” in Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young eds., Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars:
Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008), pp. 91-108.
14 For the alleged distortion of intelligence on the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, see for
example: John Prados, “The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 Years Later: Flawed Intelligence
and the Decision for War in Vietnam,” The National Security Archive
<www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB132/index.htm> accessed 3 Feb 2009; Robert Hanyok,
“Shunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds and the Flying Fish: the Gulf of Tonkin Mystery 2–4
August 1964,” Cryptologic Quarterly (2001); Robert Hanyok, Spartans in Darkness:
American SIGINT and the Indochina War, 1945-1975 (Center for Cryptologic History,
National Security Agency, 2002).
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