Another development during this period that had very profound consequences for the coming tragedy was the cancelation of the elections that would have united North and South Vietnam as one nation.

The Geneva Accords specified that elections under international supervision were to be held in July 1956, with consultations to prepare for them to be held from 20 July 1955 onwards . The United States, in its unilateral declaration, had reiterated this pledge: In the case of nations now divided against their will, we shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections supervised by the United Nations to insure that they are conducted fairly.

The elections were never held. On 16 July 1955, four days before the consultations were scheduled to begin, President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam issued a statement that made it cleat that he had no intention of engaging in the consultations, much less the elections.28 Three days later, North Vietnam sent Diem a formal note calling for the talks, but Diem remained firm in his position. Efforts by France and Great Britain to persuade Diem to begin the talks were to no avail.

The reason for Diems intransigence is well known. He, like President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, knew that Ho Chi Minh would be a certain winner of any national elections. A CIA National Intelligence Estimate in the autumn concluded that the Diem regime (which Lansdale himself called fascistic )29 almost certainly would not be able to defeat the communists in country-wide elections. 50 Later, Eisenhower was to write in his memoirs: I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. 31 (The latter was Diems predecessor.)

The study of the Pentagon papers cited State Department cables and National Security Council memorandums indicating that the Eisenhower Administration wished to postpone the elections as long as possible and communicated its feelings to Mr. Diem. 32

This was support that Diem could not have done without, for, as the Pentagon historians point out: Without the threat of U.S. intervention, South Vietnam could not have refused to even discuss the elections called for in 1956 under the Geneva settlement without being immediately overrun by the Vietminh armies. 33

The public statements of Diem and Dulles spoke only of their concern that the elections would not be free , which served to obscure the fact that Ho Chi Minh did not need to resort to fraud in order to win, as well as ignoring the announcements of both the United Nations and the International Control Commission (set up in Vietnam by the Geneva Accords) that they were ready to supervise the elections.

In any event, Diems commitment to free elections may be surmised from a referendum he held in October 1955 in South Vietnam to invest his regime with a semblance of legality, in which he received 98.2 percent of the vote. Life magazine later reported that Diems American advisers had told him that a 60 percent margin would be quite sufficient and would look better, but Diem insisted on 98 percent .34

With the elections canceled, the nation still divided, and Diem with his mandate free to continue his heavy, tyrannical rule, the turn to violence in South Vietnam became inevitable.

As if in knowledge of and preparation for this, the United States sent 350 additional military men to Saigon in May 1956, an example of the U.S. ignoring the Geneva Accords, stated the Pentagon study.35 Shortly afterwards, Dulles confided to a

colleague: We have a clean base there now, without a taint of colonialism. Dienbienphu was a blessing in disguise. 36

The Later Phase

If you grab em by the balls, the hearts and minds will follow ... Give us your hearts and minds or well burn down your goddamn village ... the end result of Americas anti-communist policy in Vietnam; also its beginning and its middle.

There was little serious effort to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, even less chance of success, for the price of success was social change, of the kind that Diem was unwilling to accept in Vietnam, the kind the United States was not willing to accept anywhere in the Third World. If Washington had been willing to accept such change- which they have always routinely and disparagingly dismissed as socialist -there would have been no need to cancel the elections or to support Diem, no need for intervention in the first place. There was, consequently, no way the United States could avoid being seen by the people of Vietnam as other than the newest imperialist occupiers, following in the footsteps of first the Chinese, then the French, then the Japanese, then the French again.

We will not go into a detailed recounting of all the horrors, all the deceptions, the destruction of a society, the panorama of absurdities and ironies; only a selection, a montage, lest we forget.

To the men who walked the corridors of power in Washington, to the military men in the field, Indochina-nay, southeast Asia-was a single, large battlefield. Troops of South Vietnam were used in Laos and Cambodia. Troops of Thailand were used in Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam. Thailand and the Philippines were used as bases from which to bomb the three countries of Indochina.

Military officers in South Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan were trained at American schools in the Philippines.

CIA-supported forces carried out incursions and invasions into China from Laos, Burma and Taiwan.

When there was a (much-publicized] pause in the bombing of North Vietnam, more American planes were thus available to increase the bombing of Laos. And so it went.

From 1955 to 1959, Michigan State University, under a US government contract, con ducted a covert police training program for the South Vietnamese. With the full knowledge of certain MSU officials, five CIA operatives were concealed in the staff of the program and carried on the universitys payroll as its employees. By the terms of a 1957 law, drawn up by the MSU group, every Vietnamese 15 years and older was required to register with the government and carry ID cards. Anyone caught without the proper identification was considered as a National Liberation Front (Vietcong) suspect and subject to imprisonment or worse. At the time of registration, a full set of fingerprints was obtained and information about the persons political beliefs was recorded.37

When popular resistance to Ngo Dinh Diem reached the level where he was more of a liability than an asset he was sacrificed. On 1 November 1963. some of Diems generals overthrew him and then murdered both him and his brother after they had surrendered. The coup, wrote Time magazine, was planned with the knowledge of

Dean Rusk and Averill Harriman at the State Department, Robert S. McNamara and Roswell Gilpatrick at the Defense Department and the late Edward R. Murrow at the U.S Information Agency. 38

Evidently Washington had not planned on assassinations accompanying the coup, but as General Maxwell Taylor, President Kennedys principal military adviser, has observed: The execution of a coup is not like organizing a tea party; its a very dangerous business. So I didnt think we had any right to be surprised ... when Diem and his brother were murdered. 39

Donald Duncan was a member of the Green Berets in Vietnam. He has written about his training, part of which was called countermeasures to hostile interrogation , ostensibly how Americans captured by Communists could deal with being tortured. Translations of an alleged Soviet interrogation manual were handed out to the class. The manual described in detail such methods as the Airplane Ride (hanging by the thumbs], the Cold-Hot Water Treatment, and the lowering of a mans testicles into a jewelers vise, while the instructor, a Sergeant Lacey, explained some variations of these methods. Then a student had a question:

Sergeant Lacey, the name of this class is Countermeasures to Hostile Interrogation, but you have spent most of the period telling us there are no countermeasures. If this is true, then the only reason for teaching them [the torture methods], it seems to me, is so that well know how to use them. Are you suggesting we use these methods?

The class laughs, and Lacey looks down at the floor creating a dramatic pause. When he raises his head, his face is solemn but his deep set eyes are dancing. We cant tell you that, Sergeant Harrison. The Mothers of America wouldnt approve. The class bursts into laughter at the sarcastic cynicism. Furthermore, a conspiratorial wink, we will deny that any such thing is taught or intended. 40

At the US Navys schools in San Diego and Maine during the 1960s and 1970s, the course had a different name. There, the students were supposedly learning about methods of survival, evasion, resistance and escape which they could use as prisoners of war. There was in the course something of survival in a desert, where students were forced to eat lizards, but the naval officers and cadets were also subjected to beatings, jarring judo flips, tiger cages -hooded and placed in a 16-cubic-foot box for 22 hours with a coffee can for their excrement-and a torture device called the water board : the subject strapped to an inclined board, head downward, a towel placed over his face, and cold water poured over the towel; he would choke, gag, retch and gurgle as he experienced the sensation of drowning, just as was done to Vietcong prisoners in Vietnam, along with the tiger cages.

A former student, Navy pilot Lt. Wendell Richard Young, claimed that his back was broken during the course and that students were tortured into spitting, urinating and defecating on the American flag, masturbating before guards, and, on one occasion, engaging in sex with an instructor.41

Fabrications were required to support the varied State Department claims about the nature of the war and the reasons for the American military actions. A former CIA officer, Philip Liechty, stated in 1982 that in the early 1960s he saw written plans to take large amounts of Communist-bloc arms, load them on a Vietnamese boat, fake a battle In which the boat would be sunk in shallow water, then call in Western reporters to see the captured weapons as proof of outside aid to the Vietcong. This is precisely what occurred in 1965. The State Departments white paper, Aggression From the