There was always the question of what the enemy would do next. The CIA’s purported expertise and mandate was intelligence gathering and they were failing at accomplishing this task during the Vietnam War. Ted Shackley, Chief of Station in Saigon, pointed to Dan Mudrinich, base chief of Region IV in Vietnam as someone who was achieving some success, but beyond securing reports on troop conditions in Cambodia through paying traveling merchants, he had little to offer Agency superiors on Viet Cong locations within Vietnam.
One day, a CIA officer happened to come into contact with a local woman whose son was a senior official in the Viet Cong. The Agency was eager to learn the location of the enemy headquarters in the U Minh Forest, which she would visit on occasion. The officer began cultivating a relationship with the woman, gaining her trust by paying for medical treatment to save the eyesight of her grandchild, supplementing this with additional money and gifts. The intelligence gathering process began with innocuous questions such as: How many people did she see in the Viet Cong headquarters in U Minh? As she gradually became more comfortable providing information, she mentioned that her son was in need of a typewriter. The CIA swiftly provided one to her, which she carried deep into the forest in a small wooden boat known as a sampan. The typewriter had been rigged with a tracking device and after it had sat idle in one location for several days, the Air Force conducted an intense bombing campaign on the target. Navy SEALs inspected the area afterwards and discovered an array of underground chambers that, as they suspected, had functioned as the headquarters for the Viet Cong in the U Minh Forest. With the mission now finished, the Agency never spoke to the woman again. The fate of her son was never determined, according to Mudrinich: “We didn’t tell her that we were going to hurt him.”
Dorothy Lamour
When Frank Maguire briefly returned home from Vietnam in 1966, he gave speeches informing skeptics in the United States that “we weren’t just running around killing people, that we were building and trying to improve people’s lives. I felt so good about it and so did the country.” As a district adviser to the 2nd Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) Division in South Vietnam, Maguire felt proud of the “civic action, reconstruction, and local security” efforts he worked on with his Vietnamese counterpart: “he was a good man. We cut ribbons together on several schools and dispensaries. The whole thing started with such high hopes.”
Maguire’s positive view of U.S. efforts in the country began to fracture in 1967 as he returned to serve in An Khê, a town in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. “They need a high school,” a U.S. general observed. Maguire cautioned: “They do, but they don’t have any teachers for this area.” His warning went unheeded as construction began on a two-story concrete high school. Once completed, the Vietnamese sentiment was: “Thank you, but where are the books and the teachers?” The U.S. response was to view them as “ungrateful bastards.” Maguire realized the U.S. attitude toward their Vietnamese counterparts was: “stand back little brother, I’ll take care of it.
He started to see how reporting could be twisted to suit the needs of superiors in the war effort. He was tasked with creating briefing charts for the Hamlet Evaluation System, the U.S. military’s attempt to measure the areas of Vietnam controlled either by the Viet Cong enemy or the South Vietnamese government. Maguire took the figures and accompanied by a colonel stayed up all night, “not changing the figures but moving them around and labeling them so it would turn out that we were winning.” Ignoring the realities on the ground, Shackley’s CIA team was later able to use this type of deception in a National Intelligence Estimate: “the pacification program is achieving statistical goals in many important respects.”
After being promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, Maguire was stationed alongside a beach in Quy Nhon, an area known for its tropical climate. As he stood on the balcony, he gazed at “a white beach, a big moon, and mountains rising up above the lagoon.” He thought to himself, All I need is Dorothy Lamour.
Nothing Left
A U.S. Army Lieutenant in the 25th Infantry Division was losing his mind in late 1968. Vincent Okamoto already had three Purple Heart medals, representing his three injuries during the Vietnam War, which he thought would be his ticket out of combat, but technicalities kept him in. He was informed the three Purple Hearts were not enough; he needed to have been hospitalized for at least seven days each time for them to count. He was sent back into the conflict for another three months while he awaited the approval of his Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second highest honor.
After several near-death experiences, Okamoto was in no mood for taking any further personal risk. At any sign of sniper fire, he would fall to the ground, his soldiers still expecting to him to exercise leadership. A radio operator approached him: “Here’s the handset, sir.” Okamoto responded: “Get the hell away from me.” These radios were key to securing firepower from a distance and aerial support when contingents were under attack. They also happened to make their users an easy target with their six-foot antennas.
Okamoto realized he was now a poor-performing officer, but he lacked the courage to approach his battalion commander and admit: “I want to be relieved. I don’t have what it takes.” His nightmare continued unabated and he found it impossible to function. Once, while listening on the radio to a platoon leader’s plea for assistance, “Bravo Six, Bravo Six, we’re taking fire, what do we do?”, an exasperated Okamoto replied callously: “I don’t know about you, you son of a bitch, but I’m hiding behind this tree.” He medicated himself through a steady stream of pharmaceuticals, including Benzedrine, that left him wired and unable to sleep. “In my case, it reached a point where I was taking downers when the sun went down and uppers when the sun came up.” It had not always been this way. After being injured twice in combat in June 1968, his third injury occurred on “the single worst night” of his life two months later on August 24.
The Worst Night
“Here they come, here they come!” Okamoto and four of his fellow soldiers were yelling as they found themselves vastly outnumbered by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), 800 to 150. The U.S. soldiers held their M-16s above their heads, firing blindly into the air from a bunker. Their radio operators now dead, Okamoto ran over to an armored personnel carrier (APC) that had been destroyed by a rocket-propelled grenade, but featured an untouched .50-caliber machine gun. He pushed the dead gunner out of the way and began firing until the machine gun ran out of ammunition. He proceeded to another similar APC, using its machine gun until it jammed. He went to a third APC, using up the remainder of its ammunition; all the while, he was surrounded by the sight of falling artillery and star clusters being launched into the sky as a call for help. He spotted a group of NVA soldiers setting up a mortar and fearing the worst, Okamoto went searching through the APC for more ammo. Finding a case of hand grenades instead, he crawled closer to the mortar team and threw three grenades in their direction, turning them “into long-division problems.” This bought him no time as his personal danger increased within seconds: “I wasn’t quite as slick as I thought because a concussion grenade landed in the little depression I was in. I tried to jump out, but I wasn’t quick enough so I got injured from the waist down.”
The 24-year-old Lieutenant limped back to the radio, with which he was “like God. I could call down from the heavens destruction on a massive scale.” This included howitzers, helicopter gunships and air force fighter bombers. “I was practically deaf from all the noise. You’re literally screaming into the radio and they’re screaming back at you. It’s really hard to capture the chaos. I still have nightmares about it.” As he radioed for assistance, he watched helplessly as his company’s bunkers were being blown up around him, with 400 NVA soldiers “coming out of the woods with fixed bayonets on their AK-47s. It’s almost surreal.” Nearly every member of his platoon died; 30% of his entire company were killed in the attack. He felt mostly anger as he was brought to a hospital bleeding from several parts of his body. Once he had a moment to rest, he then began “trembling and shaking uncontrollably.” Following his Distinguished Service Cross medal being awarded, he wondered if he was truly being recognized by the military for bravery or if “they needed a hero because they caught us napping…It’s kind of like corporate America. The management doesn’t want to say bad things are happening.”
Much to his chagrin, the number of Purple Hearts required to avoid combat operations had recently increased from two to three following the increased casualties of the Tet Offensive, and his Distinguished Service Cross was still awaiting approval, but Okamoto’s temporary moment of reprieve came when he was assigned to the role of intelligence liaison officer. This came with the perks of working from a location with “refrigerators and cold beer and hootch girls.” It was a welcome break from his point of view “because nothing was more wretched than being a grunt—nothing.” He happened to have been assigned to the Phoenix Program, an initiative he had never heard of before but which would later become infamous. His unending nightmare would continue for another two months.
April Fool
“Vietnam was so totally fucked up, nothing surprised you after a while…My parents often used the Japanese term shikata ga nai, meaning ‘it can’t be helped.’ … Once I got to Vietnam that type of philosophy was an immeasurable help because you can’t quit…My mom and dad would write, ‘Do your best. Do your duty.’ At first that was very comforting because I thought I was doing the right thing. But after six or seven weeks in Vietnam and you’ve seen a couple of napalmed villages and civilians blasted to hell—your mom and dad don’t know anything about that. That was not what I joined up to do.”
-Vincent Okamoto
The theory behind the CIA’s Phoenix Program was explained to him as being an attempt to destroy the Viet Cong’s ability to operate in South Vietnam through their presumed local base of support. “The theory was that the North Vietnamese units were strangers in South Vietnam. They could speak the language and had the same culture, but when they took the Tay Ninh off-ramp from the Ho Chi Minh Trail they needed the local population to meet them, guide them around American ambushes, and take them to base camps where they could launch their attacks.” The ultimate goal of the program he was told was “to wipe out these local supporters.”
The Phoenix operatives would be handed a list of suspected enemy supporters, fed into computers by CIA and military officers. Okamoto would be given the name of a person to pursue, “an agitprop officer…a tax collector, or…a cell leader whose people guide North Vietnamese units from the border area to safe havens in the Iron Triangle.” He would then have the impossible task of tracking down this targeted person without an address or telephone number. One attempted approach was to go to the village in question, grab someone at random and demand, “Where’s Nguyen so-and-so?” This lack of subtlety failed to work as “the people were so afraid they would say anything.” With no less subtlety, the approach then shifted to the Phoenix team taking an informant through the village, commo wire wrapped around his neck functioning as a leash, with a sandbag covering the informant’s head to mask his identity in front of the locals, with two eye-holes cut out. As led his overseers through the village, his instructions were: “When we go by Nguyen’s house, scratch your head.”
Once a target location was determined from the informant’s best guess, regardless of the current occupants of the home, the Phoenix team would return that evening, knock on the door, and open fire: “April Fool, motherfucker,” they would announce. “As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members.” Okamoto would see severed ears brought back to his base camp as evidence that the killings had taken place. “This was uncontrolled violence and at times I think it became just wholesale killing.” He could see the far-reaching consequences of this wanton destruction of human life as was so often the case in war: “If Phoenix goes in and murders someone who was not a Viet Cong, and they abuse the mother and the sister, well, anybody in the family who survives is going to be a card-carrying Viet Cong by the next afternoon.”
Dancing on the End of the Inferno
Upon returning to Saigon after a brief interval in Indiana, Frank Maguire now found a dead city. It was as if he were living on a bad movie set, with papers strewn throughout the streets and a feeling of “defeat and loss everywhere…The world was coming to an end.” He recounted the bacchanalia of the end times that ensued:
The VNAF [Vietnam Air Force] officers club outside of Tan Son Nhut had great Chinese food. The whole thing was organized for the American trade. They had girls available and people were banging them under the tables at lunch. Another Vietnamese club was always full of American State Department people and this very senior guy was playing the piano like mad and everybody was getting laid and drunk. It was like dancing on the end of the inferno. My last assignment was for JUSPAO [Joint United States Public Affairs Office] down in the Delta. Since JUSPAO was a State Department operation, whenever I came to Saigon they put me up in their hotel and the same girl would hop into my bed. It was sanctioned by the State Department!
A short time later, after he was moved to the Mekong Delta, Maguire began to work on the Phoenix Program. His supporting role consisting of preparing Wanted posters, upon which featured photos, descriptions of human targets being sought and rewards being offered. While he personally agreed with the idea of the program, he realized it was, in effect, a failure. He believed that the program amounted to an assassination effort in which civilians could be massacred with impunity: “any Vietnamese civilian killed on an operation who couldn’t be identified was scratched off the wanted list of the Phoenix Program.”
Maguire recognized a disturbing trend among his fellow officers of not viewing the Vietnamese as human. On multiple occasions, he witnessed Vietnamese being nearly run over by American drivers as if the pedestrians on the street were invisible. While crossing the street in An Khê, he said hello to a Sin City girl who was suddenly sideswiped by an American semi-trailer truck. “She just quivered and stiffened up,” he recalled. “She was dead. The driver didn’t even know it.” One particular conversation drove this point home in his mind. While in the Delta, he encountered a helicopter pilot describing a recent massacre: “I must’ve shot up fifteen, twenty sampans and you shoulda seen those little mothers jump in the water. I got most of them.” Maguire asked: “Were they VC?” The man responded: “Who the fuck cares?”
Shackley: The View from Above
As a senior official in the CIA, Ted Shackley had no interest in being sent to Vietnam. Working as Chief of Station in neighboring Laos from 1966-1968, however, made it all but a certainty. He tried one last ditch effort to delay the inevitable: he proposed becoming a student at the National War College to prepare for an assignment in Vietnam, but his superiors responded each time to this request that there was a need for experienced station chiefs in the field; he was destined for Vietnam.
While being briefed in Washington in the months prior to his move to Saigon, he focused on the most significant recent event in the war: “Did the Vietcong Tet Offensive of January 31, 1968, represent an intelligence failure? Had we no penetration agents who might have given us advance warning?” He learned that the Agency’s prospects in the region were tied to Phoenix, which he termed as “a reactive program of pacification.”
In his memoir Spymaster, Shackley only goes as far as saying the program was “controversial”; they were “mired” in it. In order to distance himself from the albatross known as Phoenix, he employs several tactics in the book. He first prefers to refer to the program as Phung Hoang, to emphasize its sign-off by the government of South Vietnam (which in itself was propped up by the United States); Phoenix, in his telling, was simply “the name that the Americans hung on it.” He then ensures that William Colby, then the head of Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), is rightfully assigned as the creator of Phoenix, which began in 1967: “As I did not arrive in Saigon until December 1968, I was not the godfather of Phung Hoang.” Finally, he alludes to CIA officers finding the activity “repugnant,” without fully explaining why. He allows only that case officers “felt that the dossiers were based on dubious information. And it was obvious that all too frequently, arrest efforts turned into firefights, and more so-called VCI were killed than detained for processing.”
Shackley did not approve of the program, he wrote; however, the program continued for years under his leadership. There was also the matter of the provincial interrogation centers (PICs), which were built by the CIA for use by local police and Agency advisers. “According to figures I was given in Washington,” Shackley recounted, “the PICs were processing a total of twenty-five hundred Vietcong prisoners per month. If this was true, I thought, more operational leads and more intelligence should be coming out.” Shackley makes no mention of abuse. His recollections—those he allows to appear on the page—revolve mostly around luncheons and relationships with the political establishment in South Vietnam. However, those who worked with him recalled that the horrors on the ground were never far away.
Shackley demanded better intelligence from his men, but they had little ability to carry out this directive, lacking both the skills and the knowledge of the Vietnamese language. They were stuck relying on local police in South Vietnam in what was known as the Special Branch, who ran the PICs. In the early part of 1969, a chief of interrogation named Orrin DeForest toured the PICs in his area of responsibility, Region III. Shackley was pitching these centers as foundational in the CIA’s drive to infiltrate the enemy’s operations. DeForest first saw prisoners in Nha Trang, who all denied any ties to the Viet Cong. They were held in terrible conditions, with cells reeking of urine and feces. He saw the futility of the situation, where the PIC officers, in his words, only “had the ability to…beat the shit out of these people, and then what would they know?”
DeForest wrote up a report on the PICs and not wanting to contradict Shackley’s direction, noted only that there was room for improvement. Later at the Biên Hòa base, DeForest continued to assert that the PICs run by the Special Branch were not working. Shackley was unimpressed; he emphasized this was the core intelligence program in Vietnam. With disdain towards the views expressed, he pointed to Region IV: they were doing just fine (in actuality, little was being accomplished, according to their chief Dan Mudrinich). Perhaps the problem, Shackley surmised, was with the CIA management in charge of this region and not the Special Branch. Following the meeting’s conclusion, DeForest never saw Shackley again. What DeForest failed to reveal regarding his experiences in the field was that earlier while visiting a PIC in Biên Hòa, he watched as four police officers from the Special Branch questioned a young girl, with one of the officers forcing a broomstick into her vagina.
It’s a Rough World
“The key thing is that as you get recruited into the CIA, it never occurs to you that, if you’re as naïve as I was, and I think that most of the young men that come into the CIA are, it never occurs to you that you’re getting into a world of dirty tricks…The thing that they use to sell is you’re finally getting into the elite inner circles of the United States government. All your life, you’ve been going through the amateurism and prelims, the prep schools in effect, and finally, this is it. This is where the people are real pros, the front line warriors saving the nation from communism.”
-John Stockwell, 1978
While the Phoenix Program officially ended in 1972, certain aspects of it continued until the end of the war, as John Stockwell was to find out. Assigned as the CIA officer in charge of Tay Ninh Province in Vietnam, one of Stockwell’s first discoveries days after his arrival was that the police chief he was tasked to work with was mutilating prisoners out of a CIA safehouse referred to as the Pink House. This local officer selected particular prisoners without families to protect them and would carve them up during the night while drinking cognac, disposing of their bodies in a nearby canal at the break of dawn, after which he would return home to sleep off a hangover. “The police officer was heavily funded by the CIA,” Stockwell wrote, “which vouched for him to his superiors in Saigon—without this support he would not have held his post. But a succession of CIA case officers had absolved themselves of responsibility for his sadistic orgies by rationalizing that they were only supporting him for his intelligence activities and were not responsible for his other actions."
Stockwell wrote up his gory discovery in a memo to Thomas Polgar, who the year before had replaced Shackley to become CIA Chief of Station in Saigon. Polgar responded by inviting Stockwell to a garden cocktail party, politely explaining to him in person why nothing could be done: “Well, it’s a rough world and sometimes you have to do business with people that really aren’t your first choice of the kind of people you want to associate with. So don’t make a wave…” Furthermore, Stockwell was told that the “Vietnamese officials’ conduct was not our business, that it wasn’t our mission to interfere, that we needed the man for other reasons, and that if I didn't have the stomach for the job I could be reassigned elsewhere but at great expense to my career. Certainly I could have quit, but you only get one such judgmental vote in the spy business, and you are either out, or are shelved in some dull corner for the rest of your career. Moreover, I had come to Vietnam to finance a divorce, and to see Asia. This was Asia.”
Stockwell terminated the sadistic safehouse and instructed his case officers: “I don’t want to hear about it. If this guy has a compulsion to do this sort of thing any more, I don’t want to hear about it.” As a result, “my staff and the local officials were careful not to mention their activities to me for the rest of my tour, which permitted a sort of plausible deniability to my conscience. I could rationalize that I had tried to do the right thing, that it wasn't my fault, that maybe he had curtailed his brutality. Perhaps I had saved a life or two by putting a little pressure on him to restrain himself.” Stockwell went on to work with the sadistic officer for two years.
Without mincing words, Stockwell later concluded: “The Phoenix Program was created by the CIA and its purpose was to kill and terrorize.” The Vietnam operation was a cynical game during Stockwell’s time there, as he wrote in “Why I Am Leaving the CIA” in 1977: “Agency operations in Vietnam would have discouraged even the most callous, self-serving of adventurers. It was a veritable Catch-22 of unprofessional conduct. Ninety-eight per cent of the operations were commonly agreed to be fabrications, but were papered over and promoted by aware case officers because of the ‘numbers game’ requirements from Headquarters for voluminous reporting.” While Stockwell received the Agency’s Intelligence Medal of Merit for his service in Vietnam, he returned it upon resigning from the CIA.
There was no need to speak truth to power, as those in power already knew the truth and had no interest in taking action. Chief of Station Polgar made this clear: “I don’t want any more reports about the corruption in the South Vietnamese army,” Stockwell recalled him saying. “I don’t believe it, I don’t accept it. If you insist on sending them in, I’m going to tear them up. If you insist after that, I will put notes in your file that you can’t follow instructions.” During the Shackley years, U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger visited the CIA station in Saigon and was asked if he was satisfied with the intelligence he received from the Agency. “As long as it supports my policy,” he replied, “I am satisfied.”
Colby: The PR Tour
Vincent Okamoto, now in law school, watched in the early 1970s as then Ambassador William Colby answered questions from a congressional committee on the Phoenix Program. He noted with contempt that “Goddamn William Colby” was treating Phoenix as some sort of “civil action program. Well, Phoenix did not dig wells, improve hygiene, conduct classes, and distribute chewing gum.”
While Colby attempted to put the most positive spin on the Phoenix Program as possible before the U.S. House Government Operations Committee in 1971, he later regretted providing concrete numbers from 1968 to May 1971 as they cemented the Program’s reputation as an assassination program: 28,978 captured; 17,717 rallied; 20,587 killed.
By 1973, Colby was up for top position as Director of the CIA, a job that forever remained out of Shackley’s reach. He answered questions in front of a U.S. Senate Committee as part of the nomination process:
Senator Symington: Mr. Colby, the record shows that more than 20,000 South Vietnamese were killed in Phoenix during your tenure. And a couple of our witnesses have deplored that large figure. Could you let us know the nature of these people who were killed, and why were they killed?
Mr. Colby: The 20,000 figure was one which I reported in 1971, Mr. Chairman. The figure is a part of the total members of the enemy apparatus who were taken out of service by either rallying to the Government, by being captured, or being killed in the course of the fight. The vast majority of the people killed were killed in military combat actions by military forces. A small portion of the total were killed by police and similar security forces in the course of resisting arrest and fighting. There were also some abuses in which people were wrongfully killed, but I think this was a very small number.
David Sheridan Harrington, a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, had been assigned to CORDS under Colby’s supervision during part of his three years of active duty in Vietnam, which ended in 1970. Colby’s nomination, Harrington wrote in a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, “disturbs me because I have believed for a long time that he has never explained fully the Phoenix Program at its operational level…in testimony before the Committee on Government Operations in 1971, Ambassador Colby answered questions on the Phoenix Program by resorting to evasive and misleading bureaucratic language to distinguish Phoenix policy from operations, and to claim that only a few abuses occurred at the local level, and those without the approval of Phoenix administrators. However, I attended a meeting in 1969 at which Mr. Colby was told directly about the operational problems of Phoenix, and the many abuses occurring at the local level. From this briefing, he could only conclude that large gaps existed between Phoenix policy in Saigon and operations in the field. Until Mr. Colby provides a complete [picture] of the Phoenix Program and his role in it, I believe that Mr. Colby’s involvement in Phoenix raises a serious question as to his suitability for high government office.” Harrington further explained that what he learned from the briefing “was that many abuses occurred at the operational level of the Phoenix Program, including widespread and uncontrolled assassinations…Yet, Mr. Colby allowed this program to continue for another two years, apparently without any better assurance that those killed were anything more than innocent Vietnamese civilians.” After being asked by the Senate if he recalled this meeting with Harrington, Colby replied: “No, I presume it was similar to a large number of such meetings, conferences, and briefings I attended during my three and a half years in Vietnam.”
Colby was confirmed as CIA Director by a vote of 83-13. In an era of bipartisan consensus, Colby thought this vote “reflected the fact that there were legitimate doubts in the Senate about my appointment.” Colby wrote to Senator Ted Kennedy, who had voted against his nomination, a letter "in which I expressed my hope that he would be proved wrong about me.” Kennedy wrote back “saying he wished me well and looked forward to my having great success in office.”
In 1976, Colby participated in a debate on the operations of the CIA at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where a member of the audience challenged his position on assassination:
Colby: Assassination is a very flamboyant kind of a word and I think that most Americans and I myself are against it. I was against it in the early 1960s. I turned down suggestions to that effect.
Shout from the audience: What about the Phoenix program?
Colby: I’ll answer the Phoenix program if you want to. I’ve been against assassinations all along. But if you read the Senate report on the subject you will find that the CIA didn’t assassinate anybody. [Uproar from the audience.] There were five pages in the report that stated that there were only two assassination attempts where the CIA did try to go out to see if they could kill somebody, but neither of them died. [Laughter from the audience.]
Frank Maguire was later surprised to learn that there was an alternative path in Vietnam that was never taken. Upon meeting a man named Charles Holland, a former Major in the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA), the two proceeded to get “terribly drunk together.” Holland had worked during World War II with Ho Chi Minh, who later fought against the United States as a key figure in the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. Holland assisted him in drafting letters to President Harry Truman, one of which was sent on February 16, 1946:
DEAR MR PRESIDENT,
I avail myself of this opportunity to thank you and the people of United States for the interest shown by your representatives at the United Nations Organization in favour of the dependent peoples.
Our VIETNAM people, as early as 1941, stood by the Allies’ side and fought against the Japanese and their associates, the French colonialists.
From 1941 to 1945 we fought bitterly, sustained by the patriotism of our fellow-countrymen and by the promises made by the Allies at YALTA, SAN FRANCISCO and POTSDAM.
When the Japanese were defeated in August 1945, the whole Vietnam territory was united under a Provisional Republican Government which immediately set out to work. In five months, peace and order were restored, a democratic republic was established on legal bases, and adequate help was given to the Allies in the carrying out of their disarmament mission.
But the French colonialists, who had betrayed in war-time both the Allies and the Vietnamese, have come back and are waging on us a murderous and pitiless war in order to reestablish their domination. Their invasion has extended to South Vietnam and is menacing us in North Vietnam. It would take volumes to give even an abbreviated report of the crimes and assassinations they are committing every day in the fighting area.
This aggression is contrary to all principles of international law and to the pledges made by the Allies during the World War. It is a challenge to the noble attitude shown before, during and after the war by the United States Government and People. It violently contrasts with the firm stand you have taken in your twelve point declaration, and with the idealistic loftiness and generosity expressed by pour delegates to the United Nations Assembly, MM BYRNES, STATTINIUS and J.F. DULLES.
The French aggression on a peace-loving people is a direct menace to world security. It implies the complicity, or at least, the connivance of the Great Democracies. The United Nations ought to keep their words. They ought to interfere to stop this unjust war, and to show that they mean to carry out in peace-time the principles for which they fought in war-time.
Our Vietnam people, after so many years of spoliation and devastation, is just beginning its building-up work. It needs security and freedom, first to achieve internal prosperity and welfare, and later to bring its small contribution to world-reconstruction.
These security and freedom can only be guaranteed by our independence from any colonial power, and our free cooperation with all other powers. It is with this firm conviction that we request of the United States as guardians and champions of World Justice to take a decisive step in support of our independence.
What we ask has been graciously granted to the Philippines. Like the Philippines our goal is full independence and full cooperation with the UNITED STATES. We will do our best to make this independence and cooperation profitable to the whole world.
I am, Dear Mr. PRESIDENT,
Respectfully Yours.
HO CHI MINH
The letters never received a reply. “I think if we really thought about it, we had no business being there,” Maguire conceded regarding the Vietnam War. He reflected on the alternative path never taken after speaking to Holland: “If we’d done the right thing, I’d never have made major, but we would have saved a lot of people. I think it’s a national trait that we always feel we know what’s better for everybody…We really wanted to win their hearts and minds, except we could never find one or the other.”
(3) The we could not leave them to themselves - they were unfit for self-government, and
they would soon have anarchy and misrule worse then Spain's was; and
(4) That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educated the
Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them and by God's grace do the very
best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.
Excerpt from McKinley's speech explaining the US making the Philippines a US colony. The arrogance and attitude have a long history.
Powerful letter at the end.