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The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a struggle between communist and pro-western forces
that lasted from the end of World War II until 1975. The communist Viet
Minh, or League for the Independence of Vietnam, sought to gain control of
the entire nation from its stronghold in the north. Opposing it were, first,
France, and later the United States and United Nations forces, who supported
the non-communist forces in southern Vietnam. In 1975, in violation of a
1973 peace treaty negotiated to end United States military involvement in
South Vietnam and active war against North Vietnam, North Vietnamese
forces and South Vietnamese communist sympathizers seized control of South
Vietnam
Converted T-28 trainer aircraft and 250-pound bombs used by Meo pilots of
Vang Pao's "mini-Air Force," a CIA-sponsored unit that fought against the
North Vietnamese in northern Laos in 1972. ©
BETTMANN/CORBIS
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and reunited the two countries into a single communist country.
American involvement in Vietnam has long been a subject of controversy. The
fighting depended, to a greater extent than in any conflict before, on the
work of intelligence forces. Most notable among these were various U.S.
military intelligence organizations, as well as the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA).
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Early stages. Led by Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), the Viet Minh aligned
themselves with the Soviets from the 1920s. However, they configured their
struggle not in traditional communist terms as a class struggle, but as a war
for national independence and unity, and against foreign domination. Vietnam
at the time was under French control as part of Indochina, and World War II
provided the first opportunity for a Viet Minh uprising against the French, in
1940. France, by then aligned with the Axis under the Vichy government,
rapidly suppressed the revolt. Nor did the free French, led by General Charles
de Gaulle, welcome the idea of Vietnamese independence.
After the war was over, de Gaulle sent troops to resume control, and fighting
broke out between French and Viet Minh forces on December 19, 1946. On
May 7, 1954, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu fell to the Viet Minh after
an eight-week siege. Two months later, in July 1954, the French signed the
Geneva Accords, by which they formally withdrew from Vietnam.
The Geneva Accords divided the country along the 17th parallel, but this
division was to be only temporary, pending elections in 1956. However, in
1955 Ngo Dinh Diem declared the southern portion of the nation the Republic
of Vietnam, with a capital at Saigon. In 1956, Diem, with the backing of the
United States, refused to allow elections, and fighting resumed. The conflict
was now between South Vietnam and the communist republic of North
Vietnam, whose capital was Hanoi. Fighting the Army of the Republic of
Vietnam (ARVN) were not only the regular army forces of the North
Vietnamese Army (NVA), but also Viet Cong, guerrillas from the South who
had received training and arms from the North.
American involvement. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had already sent
the first U.S. military and civilian advisers to Vietnam in 1955, and four years
later, two military advisers became the first American casualties in the
conflict. The administration of President John F. Kennedy greatly expanded
U.S. commitments to Vietnam, such that by late 1962 the number of military
advisers had grown to 11,000. At the same time, Washington's support for
the unpopular
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Former South Vietnamese commando Tran Quoc Hung, left, with fellow
commando Pham Ngoc Khanh were recruited by the CIA as intelligence
gatherers during the 1960s and 1970s. Both sought recognition for
Vietnamese commandos who aided the CIA and the Deaprtment of Defense
during the Vietnam conflict.
AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
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Diem had faded, and when American intelligence learned of plans for a coup
by his generals, the United States did nothing to stop it. Diem was
assassinated on November 1, 1963.
Under President Lyndon B. Johnson, U.S. participation in the Vietnam War
reached its zenith. The beginnings of the full-scale commitment came after
August 2, 1964, when North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin
attacked the U.S. destroyer Maddox. Requesting power from Congress to
strike back, Johnson received it in the form of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,
which granted the president virtual carte blanche to prosecute the war in
Vietnam.
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High point of the war. As a result of his strengthened position to wage
war, and still enjoying broad support from the American public, Johnson
launched a bombing campaign against North Vietnam in late 1964, and again
in March 1965, after a Viet Cong attack on a U.S. installation at Pleiku. By
June 1965, as the first U.S. ground troops arrived, U.S. troop strength stood
at 50,000. By year's end, it would be near 200,000.
General William C. Westmoreland, who had assumed command of U.S. forces
in Vietnam in June 1964, maintained that victory required a sufficient
commitment of ground troops. Yet by the mid-1960s, the NVA had begun
moving into the South via the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and as communist forces
began to take more villages and hamlets, they seemed poised for victory.
Johnson pledged greater support, but despite growing number of ground
troops and intensive bombing of the North in 1967, U.S. victory remained
elusive.
The turning point in the U.S. effort came on January 30, 1968, when the NVA
and Viet Cong launched a surprise attack during celebrations of the
Vietnamese lunar new year, or Tet. The Tet Offensive, though its value as a
military victory for the North is questionable, was an enormous psychological
victory that convinced Americans that short of annihilation of North Vietnam—
an unacceptable geopolitical alternative—they could not win a Korea-like
standoff or outright victory in Vietnam. In March 1968, Johnson called for an
end to bombing north of the 20th parallel, and announced that he would not
seek reelection. Westmoreland, too, was relieved of duty.
Withdrawal (1969–75). The administration of President Richard Nixon in
1969 began withdrawing, and instituted a process of "Vietnamization," or
turning control of the war over to the South Vietnamese. In 1970, the most
significant military activity took place in Cambodia and Laos, where U.S. B-52
bombers continually pounded the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an effort to cut off
supply lines.
Despite the bombing campaign, undertaken in pursuit of Vietnamization and
the goal of making the war winnable for the South, the North continued to
advance. On January 27, 1973, the United States and North Vietnam signed
the Paris Peace Accords, and U.S. military involvement in Vietnam ended.
During the two years that followed, the North Vietnamese gradually advanced
on the South. On April 30, 1975, communist forces took control of Saigon as
government members and supporters fled. On July 2, 1976, the country was
formally united as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and Saigon renamed Ho
Chi Minh City.
The intelligence and special operations war. Behind and alongside the
military war was an intelligence and special operations war that likewise dated
back to World War II. At that time, the United States, through the
Organization of Strategic Services (OSS), actually worked closely with Viet
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Minh operatives, who OSS agents regarded as reliable allies against the
Japanese. Friendly relations with the Americans continued after the Japanese
surrender, when OSS supported the cause of Vietnamese independence.
This stance infuriated the French, who sought to reestablish control while
avoiding common cause with the Viet Minh. They attempted to cultivate or
create a number of local groups, among them a Vietnamese mafia-style
organization, that would work on their behalf against the Viet Minh. These
efforts, not to mention the participation of one of the world's most welltrained special warfare contingents, the Foreign Legion, availed the French
little gain.
Special Forces, military intelligence, and CIA. In the first major U.S.
commitment to Vietnam, Kennedy brought to bear several powerful weapons
that together signified his awareness that Vietnam was not a war like the
others America had fought: the newly created Special Forces group, known
popularly as the "Green Berets," as well as CIA and a host of military
intelligence organizations.
Though Special Forces are known popularly for their prowess in physical
combat, their mission in Vietnam from the beginning had a strong
psychological warfare component. In May 1961, Kennedy committed 400 of
these elite troops to the war in Southeast Asia, and more would follow.
Alongside them, in many cases, were military intelligence personnel, whose
ranks in Vietnam numbered 3,000 by 1967. Most of these were in two army
units, the Army Security Agency (ASA) and the Military Intelligence Corps.
The work of military intelligence ranged from the signals intelligence of ASA,
one of whose members became the first regular-army U.S. soldier to die in
combat in 1961, to the electronic intelligence conducted by navy destroyers
such as the ill-fated Maddox. In addition, military aircraft such as the SR-71
Blackbird and U-2 conducted extensive aerial reconnaissance.
As for CIA, by the time the war reached its height in the mid-to late 1960s, it
had some 700 personnel in Vietnam. Many of these operated undercover
groups that included the Office of the Special Assistant to the Ambassador
(OSA, led by future CIA chief William Colby), which occupied a large portion
of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
Cooperation and conflict. These three major arms of the intelligence and
special operations war—Special Forces and other elite units, military
intelligence, and CIA—often worked together. When Kennedy sent in the first
contingent of Special Forces, they went to work alongside CIA, to whom the
president in 1962 gave responsibility for paramilitary operations in Vietnam.
Unbeknownst to most Americans, CIA was also in charge of paramilitary
operations in two countries where the United States was not officially
engaged: Cambodia and Laos. Long before Nixon's campaign to cut off the
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Ho Chi Minh Trail with strategic bombers, CIA operatives were training a
clandestine army of tribesmen and mercenaries in Laos. Ordinary U.S. troops
were not involved in this sideshow war in the interior of Southeast Asia: only
Special Forces, who—in order to conceal their identity as American troops—
bore neither U.S. markings nor U.S. weaponry.
CIA and army intelligence personnel worked on another notorious operation,
Phoenix, an attempt to seek out and neutralize communist personnel in South
Vietnam during the period from 1967 to 1971. CIA claimed to have killed,
captured, or turned as many as 60,000 enemy agents and guerrillas in
Phoenix, a project noted for the ruthlessness with which it was carried out. In
this undertaking, CIA and the army had the nominal assistance of South
Vietnamese intelligence, but due to an abiding U.S. mistrust of their putative
allies, the Americans gave the Saigon little actual role in Phoenix.
The military and CIA debacles. In other situations, CIA and military
groups did not so much intentionally collaborate as they found themselves
thrown together, often at cross-purposes, or at least in ways that were not
mutually beneficial. While U.S. Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin were
monitoring North Vietnamese electronic transmissions, CIA was busy striking
at Viet Minh naval facilities with fast craft whose South Vietnamese (or
otherwise non-American) crews made CIA involvement deniable. But North
Vietnamese intelligence was as capable as its military, and they fired on the
Maddox in direct response to this CIA operation.
The U.S. military became involved in another CIA debacle when, in 1968,
army intelligence tried to resume a failed effort by CIA's Studies and
Observation Group (SOG), another cover organization. From the early 1960s,
SOG had been attempting to parachute South Vietnamese agents into North
Vietnam, with the intention of using them as saboteurs and agents
provocateur. The effort backfired, with most of the infiltrators dead,
imprisoned, or used by the North Vietnamese as bait. CIA put a stop to the
undertaking, but army intelligence tried to succeed where CIA had failed—
only to lose several hundred more Vietnamese agents.
The U.S. Air Force had to take over another unsuccessful CIA operation, Black
Shield, which involved a series of reconnaissance flights by A-12 Oxcart spy
planes over North Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. Using the A-12, which could
reach speeds of Mach 3.1 (2,300 m.p.h. or 3,700 k.p.h.), Black Shield
gathered extensive information on Soviet-built surface-to-air missile (SAM)
installations in the North. To obtain the best possible photographic
intelligence, the Oxcarts had to fly relatively low and slow, and in the fall of
1967 North Vietnamese SAMs hit—but did not down—an A-71. In 1968, the
U.S. Air Force, operating SR-71 Blackbirds, replaced CIA.
Assessing CIA in Vietnam. Despite the notorious nature of Phoenix or the
CIA undertakings in Cambodia and Laos, as well as the occasions when CIA
overplayed its hand or placed the military in the position of cleaning up one of
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its failed operations, CIA involvement in Vietnam was far from an unbroken
record of failure. One success was Air America. The latter, a proprietary
airline chartered in 1949, supplied the secret war in the interior, and also
undertook a number of other operations in Vietnam and other countries in
Asia. That Air America was only disbanded in 1981, long after the war ended,
illustrates its effectiveness.
The popular image of CIA operatives in Vietnam as fiends blinded by hatred
of communism—an image bolstered by Hollywood—is as lacking in historical
accuracy as it is in depth of characterization. Like other Americans involved in
Vietnam, members of CIA began with the belief that they could and would
save a vulnerable nation from Soviet-style totalitarianism and provide its
people with an opportunity to develop democratic institutions, establish
prosperity, and find peace. Much more quickly than their counterparts in the
military and political communities, however, members of the intelligence
community came to recognize the fallacies on which their undertaking was
based.
Intelligence vs. the military and the politicians. Whereas many political
and military leaders adhered to standard interpretations about the North
Vietnamese, such as the idea that they were puppets of Moscow whose
power depended entirely on force, CIA operatives with closer contact to
actual Vietnamese sources recognized the appeal of the Viet Minh nationalist
message. And because CIA recognized the strength of the enemy, their
estimate of America's ability to win the war—particularly as the troop buildup
began in the mid-1960s—became less and less optimistic.
CIA appraisal of the situation tended to be far less sanguine than that of
General Westmoreland and other military leaders, and certainly less so than
that of President Johnson and other political leaders far removed from the
conflict. In 1965, for instance, CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
produced a joint study in which they predicted that the bombing campaign
would do little to soften North Vietnam. This was not a position favored by
Washington, however, so it received little attention.
Whereas Washington favored an air campaign, General Westmoreland
maintained that the war would be won by ground forces. Both government
and military leaders agreed on one approach: the use of statistics as a
benchmark of success or failure. In terms of the number of bombs dropped,
cities hit, or Viet Cong and NVA killed, American forces seemed to be winning.
Yet for every guerrilla killed, the enemy seemed to produce two or three more
in his place, and every village bombed seemed only to increase enemy
resistance.
The lessons of Vietnam. In the end, the United States effort in Vietnam
was undone by the singularity of aims possessed by its enemies in the North;
the instability and unreliability of its allies in the South, combined with
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American refusal to give the South Vietnamese a greater role in their own
war; and a divergence of aims on the part of American leaders.
For example, the Tet Offensive, which resulted in so many Viet Cong deaths
that the guerrilla force was essentially eliminated, and NVA regulars took the
place of the Viet Cong, is remembered as a victory for the North. And it was a
victory in psychological, if not military, terms. The surprise, fear, and
disappointment elicited by the Tet Offensive—combined with a rise of political
dissent within the United States—punctured America's will to wage the war,
and marked the beginning of the end of American participation in Vietnam.
For some time, U.S. college campuses had seen small protests against the
war, but in 1968 the number of these demonstrations grew dramatically, as
did the ranks of participants. Nor were youth the only Americans now
opposing the war in large numbers: increasingly, other sectors of society—
including influential figures in the media, politics, the arts, and even the
sciences—began to make their opposition known. In the final years of
Vietnam, there was a secondary war being fought in the United States—a war
concerning America's vision of itself and its role in the world.
By war's end, Vietnam itself had largely been forgotten. Despite earlier
promises of a liberal democratic government, the unified socialist republic fell
prey to the exigencies typical of communist dictatorship: mass imprisonments
and executions, forced redistribution of land, and the banning of political
opposition. Forgotten, too, were Laos and even Cambodia, where the Khmer
Rouge launched a campaign of genocide that killed an estimated two million
people.
The Vietnamese invasion in 1979 probably saved thousands of Cambodian
lives, but in the aftermath, Vietnam came to be regarded as a colonialist
power. The nation once admired by the third world for standing up to
America now became a pariah, supported only by Moscow—which had gained
access to a valuable warm-water port at Cam Ranh Bay—and its allies in
Eastern Europe.
During the remainder of the 1970s, America was in retreat, its attention
turned away from the fate of countries that fell to communism or, in the case
of Iran, to Islamic fundamentalist dictatorship. Americans focused their anger
on those they regarded as having led them astray during the war years:
politicians, the military, and CIA, which came under intense scrutiny during
the 1975–76 Church committee hearings in the U.S. Senate. Only in the
1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, did the United States return to an
activist stance globally.
Read more: Vietnam War - Early stages, American involvement
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