A House Divided: The CIA, State, and a Coup in South Vietnam

Sasha Ingber: Welcome to SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week, I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

It's a dark moment in American history that leads to a lot of what ifs. By the spring of 1963, eight years into the war in Vietnam, two opposing factions across the CIA and the State Department had President John F. Kennedy's ear. One side wanted to keep South Vietnam's first president, Ngô Đình Diệm, in power. The other wanted to see him removed. Then unrest in Saigon caught the CIA by surprise, and the rift in Washington grew deeper. Author Jack Cheevers spent a decade piecing together and writing Kennedy's Coup, which lays out the grave decision to oust Diệm, which led to his death and arguably escalated the war.

The first US combat troops deployed two years later.

Hey, Jack. Welcome to SpyCast.

Jack Cheevers: Thank you so much for inviting me, Sasha. It's a big honor and a pleasure to be here. 

Sasha Ingber Well, I've been looking forward to it. So can we start off by thinking about 1955 when Ngô Đình Diệm became president? How close was he with Washington?

Jack Cheevers: Well, he was close with Washington, uh, from the very beginning. The Eisenhower administration was giving him aid and advice, uh, throughout the '50s. Uh, President Eisenhower invited him to the United States on a state visit, and in 1957, he, he addressed a joint session of Congress. He got a standing ovation.

Uh, he had a ticker tape parade down Broadway in New York City where quarter of a million people, uh, turned out to see him. He was being portrayed in that era as an anti-communist hero, uh, who was holding his, uh, fledgling country together in the face of, uh, very severe communist aggression. When President Kennedy was elected in 1960, uh, Diệm was starting to get into a more and more serious, uh, struggle against communist-led Vi- Viet Cong guerrilla army, and he went to President Kennedy toward the end of, uh, 1961 and asked him, uh, for help in battling the, the Viet Cong.

Kennedy had known Diệm for a number of years. He had met him in Washington in 1953 at a luncheon that was organized by, uh, Supreme Court Justice, uh, William O. Douglas. He was a, a staunch anti-communist himself. He had pledged to defend liberty around the world, no matter what the cost, no matter what the burden to the United States.

And so he put together a package of, uh, support for Diệm, very large, uh, amounts of military aid and economic aid. Uh, the military part of that was called, um, Operation FIFA, and under that program we began sending, uh, all sorts of US weapons, tanks, artillery, armored personnel carrier, nepalm, machine guns, uh- uniforms, all sorts of, all sorts of weapons to the South Vietnamese government.

We also supplied them with several thousand US combat advisors. These weren't combat troops, these were advisors who would go into the field with the So- South Vietnamese Army and advise them on tactics countering the Viet Cong troops that they encountered. 

Sasha Ingber: All that taken into account, can you then explain the incidents that led officials to have splintered views of Diệm?

What incidents caused this? 

Jack Cheevers: Well, the incidents took place in 1963, and, uh, as Diệm at that time faced two pretty serious problems. One was an existential war against the Viet Cong, and the other was what turned into a national protest movement by the Buddhist population, which made up about 70% of South Vietnam's people at the time.

And the background to that is that Diệm was a Catholic president. Members of his family were very prominent Catholics, and, uh, the Buddhists felt that the Diệm government was discriminating against them and even persecuting them in terms of, um, not giving them job opportunities and promotional opportunities in the civil government as well as the military.

The Buddhists began, uh, openly protesting, uh, and the Diệm government was faced with, uh, how to cope with that, and he didn't do a particularly sensitive job of coping with, with the Buddhist protests. The first incident took place in May of 1963, when a group of Buddhists were protesting outside a government radio station, and Diệm's security forces, uh, moved in and wound up killing eight people.

Uh, the next incident took place the following month, uh, in Saigon, where a Buddhist monk, uh, set fire to himself in the middle of a downtown intersection, uh, producing one of-

Sasha Ingber: What became a famous photo ... 

Jack Cheevers: very famous news photo. And the third incident, which really kind of was the boiling point for the Kennedy administration, took place in August of 1963 where Diệm sent his, uh, his army and his police into Buddhist pagodas throughout the country in Saigon, Da Nang, and Hue, and they arrested 1,400 Buddhist monks and nuns and threw them in prison 

Sasha Ingber: And I'm curious to understand whether the CIA saw that unrest coming, how they viewed it, and what CIA Director John McCone thought of Diệm ultimately.

Jack Cheevers: Well, uh, the CIA, um, they were certainly aware of what the Buddhists were doing during the spring and summer. CIA agents were actually disguising themselves as newsmen and hanging around the pagodas, trying to pick up any information they could on the Buddhist leadership, what their motives were, what their next moves were gonna be.

But the decisive incident, which was the raid on the pagodas, caught the CIA completely, uh, off guard. The CIA station chief at the time, John Richardson, actually told David Halberstam, who was a New York Times correspondent, that, "This took us completely by surprise. We had no idea this was going on." That was very surprising because the CIA had about 200 agents and support personnel in Saigon at the time.

It was one of the biggest CIA stations in the world, and they were plugged into the Diệm government at, at all levels. John Richardson was, himself was pretty closely aligned with Diệm. Diệm's brother, Ngô Đình Nhu, among other things, was head of the secret police. 

Sasha Ingber:Very much feared as the head of the secret police.

Jack Cheevers: Yes, definitely. And a- as for McCone, he was a supporter of, of Diệm. He thought Diệm was doing a good job in the war. He thought that the war could be won under Diệm's leadership. He opposed a coup primarily because he thought that there was no suitable alternative for Diệm as leader of South Vietnam. 

Sasha Ingber: And at the same time, there is this CIA officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lucien Conein, who ends up becoming a middleman between the US Ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, who disagrees with McCone and wants Diệm to go, and Vietnamese generals who agree with Lodge.

Can you tell us about Conein? Why was he the go-between, and what role was he playing? 

Jack Cheevers: Well, Conein's a very interesting character. The generals really trusted Conein, and they generally didn't trust other Americans at the time. They had known Conein for a long time. Conein had come to South Vietnam in, in the mid-1950s as part of what was called the Saigon Military Mission under the famous Edward Lansdale, another CIA operative.

So in a way, Conein had kind of grown up with some of these military officers in South Vietnam. They had met him when they were junior officers, when they were lieutenants and, uh, majors in the, in the, what was then the French Colonial Army. They'd gone drinking with him. They'd gone out to nightclubs with him.

He was one of them. He was a fellow soldier. He was a great storyteller. He was a very entertaining guy to spend an evening with over a couple of drinks, and they just trusted him. They knew him, and they trusted him, and they insisted on dealing with the embassy through him and only through him. He was trying to find out anything and everything he could about their coup plans, you know, what units were, uh, switching sides and joining the generals, when it was gonna take place, would they have enough strength to actually overthrow Diệm and, and the f- the forces in Saigon that were loyal to Diệm.

Sasha Ingber: Now, why is a CIA officer, Conein, taking orders from Ambassador Lodge as opposed to the CIA station chief? That seems a bit strange. 

Jack Cheevers: It does seem a bit strange, and that was, uh, a policy change Kennedy initiated just a few months into his, into his presidency. He sent a letter to all US, uh, embassies around the world saying that the local ambassador would have supreme authority over all civilian operations in their assigned country.

So Lodge was, very closely supervised, uh, Conein and his dealings with the plotting generals in the run-up to the coup in '63. 

Sasha Ingber: Now, what was it that made Lodge want to see Diệm go? Was it that he believed this man did not represent democracy, which the United States supported, or that he didn't think that Diệm would be up for the task of defending US interests against the Viet Cong?

Jack Cheevers: Well, he had been appointed by President Kennedy. Even though, uh, Lodge was a very prominent Republican, Kennedy had won against him in a couple of elections and beaten him for a US Senate seat in Massachusetts, and of course the, uh, presidency, uh, in 1960 when Lodge was Nixon's running mate. But they, they knew each other, they liked each other.

They're both from Massachusetts, both Harvard guys, both former newspapermen. And Kennedy, before Lodge even went to Saigon, brought him into the Oval Office and said, "We may have to do something to, uh, get rid of Diệm this year, and I hope you're up for that." So Lodge went to Saigon thinking that the US government might get behind a coup.

And as he got to know, uh, Diệm and his brother, Nhu, and, uh, Nhu's infamous wife, uh, Madam Nhu, more and more he believed that, uh, they were incapable of governing South Vietnam. They were too repressive, they weren't handling the Buddhist situation very well, and that the war couldn't be won under Diệm's leadership.

Sasha Ingber: And you've written that, uh, the generals who had been working for Diệm and turned felt that Diệm was essentially promoting people based on their political loyalties. And then in the dead of summer of 1963, JFK approves the Green Light Cable. Can you tell us what that is? 

Jack Cheevers: The Green Light Cable was, uh, one of the most significant directives of the Vietnam War, and it, it was written by a gentleman by the name of Roger Hilsman.

He was at the time an assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern Affairs, so he was a fairly high-ranking member of the Kennedy administration. He was very unhappy with Diệm. He thought that Diệm was losing the war. He thought that Diệm was doing a, a very bad job of dealing with the Buddhist uprising, and he thought it was time for Diệm to go.

So he drafted this cable. It instructed Henry Cabot Lodge, who by the way had only been in Saigon for all of two days at the time when he got this cable, to reach out to the generals and essentially say that if the Diệm government collapsed for any reason, the United States would continue to extend a new government, uh, full military and economic support.

And he drafted it on a, on a Saturday afternoon in August. Almost everybody in Washington was gone somewhere on vacation or other business. JFK himself was with his family in Cape Cod. And so the cable didn't receive nearly as much top-level scrutiny as it should have, and it wound up that Kennedy approved it, and Lodge immediately started reaching out to the generals 

Sasha Ingber: And this is something that the CIA wasn't even aware of, you wrote.

But let's also talk about what Kennedy himself was going through in this moment, because at the time, Kennedy himself was deep in mourning. Would that have potentially played a factor in the signing of the Green Light cable? 

Jack Cheevers: Yeah. Kennedy had just lost a baby son. His son Patrick had been born on August 9th, 1963 at a hospital in Boston and died just a few days later of respiratory difficulties.

And it was obviously something that weighed on President Kennedy very heavily, weighed on Jackie Kennedy very heavily. They were very much in mourning for their little son in August when they were up in Cape Cod with the rest of their family. So it wasn't the best time for him to be making major decisions, strategic decisions about Vietnam or, or anything else.

But he did. He was president and, you know, he tried to attend to presidential business as much as possible. How much of an impact did his son's death had on him? I don't think anybody can possibly answer that question, but I, I would, I find it hard to believe that it didn't have any effect on him. 

Sasha Ingber: How sure was Kennedy upon signing the document?

Jack Cheevers: Well, I think that Kennedy very quickly realized that the Green Light cable was a mistake, that it hadn't received a high level of discussion, that it, it should have, uh, he felt that it should have been discussed in Washington with all his, his senior advisors present. He felt that it was poorly drafted.

It was hastily sent to Lodge. And in fact, he brought his advisors into the White House on the following Monday morning to discuss the whole thing, and he went around the room and asked each one of them, "What do you think of this?" And despite his doubts about it, despite his realization that it was an error to send it out, he didn't withdraw it.

He stuck with the cable and it, and it stayed in, in effect. 

Sasha Ingber: Was there an element of the Bay of Pigs debacle in the back of his mind? 

Jack Cheevers: Well, if you listen to the, to the White House tapes in all the discussion of the coup, uh, that went on in the summer and fall of '63, you can sense Kennedy's hesitation, his doubts about what's going on.

He asks over and over and over of his advisors, "Does Diệm have the military strength to stay in power? Do the generals have the strength to unseat him? Are we gonna win or lose if we get behind the generals on this thing?" And he never says it explicitly, but I think it wa- it was very much on his mind, the Bay of Pigs, and what a debacle that was, what a huge embarrassment that was for his administration very early on. And he didn't want another Bay of Pigs. That would have been a second huge political embarrassment, a huge foreign policy setback. And I think that's why he was so concerned and so almost myopically concerned with whether or not Diệm could beat the generals or vice versa.

Sasha Ingber: So as we approach November 1st, which is when the coup begins, is the CIA picking up on what is happening? Are there elements from within that are trying to stop this, knowing that this cable has gone out, knowing that CIA Officer Conein has been the intermediary between Ambassador Lodge and those generals?

Jack Cheevers: I think the main CIA opposition to the coup was coming from John McCone, and he was telling Kennedy of his doubts. And McCone predicted with great accuracy that a coup against Diệm would be followed by a period of political instability that could give an advantage to the Viet Cong, and that it would be followed by a second coup, which would create even more instability in, in South Vietnam.

And that's exactly what happened. He was very prophetic. 

Sasha Ingber: When we come back, how the assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm unfolded

So take us through this brutal assassination as it begins with the generals approaching the palace where Diệm lives in Saigon. 

Jack Cheevers: Well, the, the generals launched the coup on the afternoon of November 1st, 1963, and the rebel troops swept into Saigon. They seized a number of strong points. They seized the airport.

They seized the government radio station in Saigon, National Police Headquarters, and then they laid siege to the presidential palace, this beautiful old French colonial building where Diệm and Nhu were located at the time. They were both in an underground bunker. And the generals opened fire on the palace with tanks, artillery.

They sent aircraft over the palace. They dropped bombs on it. They dropped napalm on it. And this went on all through that day into the evening and all night. And their troops finally broke through, uh, the palace guard, which was defending, uh, Diệm and Nhu, uh, broke through their, their ranks and into the palace on the morning of November 2nd, only to find that Diệm and Nhu had escaped the night before.

They had somehow managed to get through the cordon of rebel troops around the palace and get in a car and go to the home of a longtime political ally of theirs in the Chinese section of Saigon, known as Cholon. And Diệm spent the whole night on the phone, chain-smoking, drinking endless cups of tea, trying to rally loyal military commanders in different parts of the country to come to Saigon and, and save him.

But at that point, virtually all of his military leaders had joined the rebels. 

Sasha Ingber: And at one point, he even calls up Ambassador Lodge, asking for an indication of whether or not the United States supports the coup. What does Lodge tell him? 

Jack Cheevers: Yes, uh, that's right. He did call Lodge. He was at home. He was in the ambassadorial residence.

And Diệm opened the conversation by saying, "What is the attitude of the United States?" Meaning, what is the attitude toward the, the coup that's, that's happening right now. And Lodge very disingenuously said, "It's 4:30 in the morning in Washington. The US government can't possibly have an attitude toward what's happening here in Saigon." But of course, Lodge knew exactly what the attitude of the US government was. It was in favor of a coup. It had encouraged the But he didn't say that to, to Diệm. Instead, he praised Diệm's courage.

He's praised his leadership of, of South Vietnam. He said, "Are you aware that the generals are offering you safe passage out of the country?" And Diệm said, "No, I'm not aware of that." And the conversation ended. 

Sasha Ingber: Now, in, in breaking down elements of what happened during the coup, this CIA officer, Conein, was also involved at the general's headquarters, you write.

He's wearing a US Army uniform. He's helping them, but at the same time, he is also trying to help Diệm and his brother escape, trying to summon a plane from Okinawa to pick them up. Can you talk about that side of the situation? 

Jack Cheevers: Right. The generals had told Conein to come to the coup headquarters, which was out near the airport, and to bring as much money with him as, as, uh, he could.

So he showed up there with a bag full of 3 million piastres, which was the US equivalent of about $42,000. The generals wanted that money to bribe any military commanders who were still sitting on the fence, and also to pay, uh, compensation to the families of rebel soldiers who were killed during the coup, or so they said.

I'm not really sure what happened to that money, but Conein did show up with $42,000 in cash, and he was in their headquarters through the entire coup. He was radioing a stream of, uh, almost, you know, minute-by-minute reports to the US Embassy, which was then forwarding it to Washington. So everybody in Washington was aware of exactly what was happening.

At one point, toward the end of the coup, right before Diệm and Nhu- and his brother, Nhu, surrendered, the generals asked Lou Conein for a plane, an air- a US aircraft, to get Diệm out of the country. Uh, and Lou Conein immediately called his boss, who was the acting station chief at the time, a, a gentleman by the name of David Smith, and said, "Do we have any aircraft we can use to get him out of here?"

And David Smith said the nearest long range aircraft, which was, was a KC-135, was on Okinawa and would take 24 hours to get it to Saigon. Of course, there were other aircraft there at the time who were US military aircraft that could have taken him out, but Conein went back to the generals and said, you know, uh, "We can't get this KC-135 for at least a day."

Sasha Ingber: And those 24 hours would be crucial. Why couldn't another aircraft had been used? 

Jack Cheevers: Right. Absolutely. The, the generals responded, the coup leader, General Big Minh, told Conein we, we, we can't hold them that long. And Minh, by the way, was the guy who later ordered the assassination of, of Diệm and, and Nhu. But the, the US had-- they didn't really make any preparations to evacuate Diệm.

Diệm was a longtime ally of the United States. We were giving him all sorts of military and economic aid. You know, we did have the means to get him out of there. Uh, nobody really offered it. Lodge later said that he offered his personal aircraft to Diệm. I didn't find any evidence of that whatsoever. And I'm not sure that even if we had offered Diệm a way out, that he would've gone.

He was a very proud man, a very stubborn man, a very strong nationalist. He didn't like to have to rely on foreign governments for aid. And I'm not sure that even if there had been a way out for him, he would've taken it. I think that he was determined to talk to the generals, see if he could reach out some sort of resolution with them, and unfortunately, they murdered him before he had a chance to do that 

Sasha Ingber: How did he and his brother end up being killed?

Jack Cheevers: Well, by the morning of November 2nd, they realized that no help was coming from any loyal military people. So they called up the generals and said that they were ready to surrender. They put on suits. They went to a Catholic church in Cholon, and the general sent out a small convoy to pick them up. There were a couple of jeeps, just a handful of soldiers, and an armored personnel carrier.

And this convoy arrived at the church. They put Diệm and Nhu in the back of the armored personnel carrier. They tied their hands behind their backs, and then they, they murdered them. They didn't just kill them. They brutally butchered both of them. Nhu was bayoneted more than 30 times, and then he was shot a couple of times for good measure.

As Diệm was shot in the back of the head a couple of times, and they were driven back to the general's headquarters. They opened up the armored personnel carriers and, and showed them the corpses. And, uh, you know, the generals had won. They had overthrown the Diệm government. 

Sasha Ingber: Why that level of brutality?

Jack Cheevers: Not clear to me. I think that the South Vietnamese army officer who I believe was responsible for the execution, uh, there's one story that, uh, that Nhu had, uh, had, had injured his wife. I'm not sure if that's a true story or not, but he was the one who bayoneted Nhu over and over and over. 

Sasha Ingber Whether we're talking about the Ambassador Lodge or Conein, the CIA officer, did they foresee that Diệm was going to be assassinated, or did they think that he ultimately would be able to take a plane out?

Jack Cheevers: Well, I think this was not good for, for the American government to be tied into these assassinations at all. President Kennedy liked Diệm. He admired Diệm. He had supported South Vietnam, uh, when he was a member of the US Senate in the '50s. He had obviously given a lot of aid to Diệm's government. And he was genuinely shocked, uh, when Diệm and, and Nhu were murdered.

In the summer of '63, he told his aides that he hoped that no harm would come to them. If the coup happened, he hoped that they would only be sent into exile out some- outside the country somewhere. And during the meeting at the National Security Council in the White House where he learned of the murders, there was an eyewitness there, General Maxwell Taylor, who said that Kennedy had jumped to his feet with a look of shock on his face that Taylor had never seen before and rushed out of the room.

Kennedy understood that the US government bore a measure of responsibility for what had happened during the coup, and I think he was, I think he was genuinely upset by it.

Sasha Ingber Diệm was buried in an unmarked grave. He was then moved decades later. Did any of the people who were involved in his ousting on the US side express regret?

Jack Cheevers: Well, Kennedy did, I think he did express some regret, but it was private. I mean, he never expressed that publicly. I'm not aware that, that anybody else did express regret. Lodge later said that he had tried to get Diệm out of Saigon on his own plane, but that didn't happen, which implies a, a some level of, of regret.

Some of the people who had opposed the coup were very upset by what had happened, uh, and they realized that this was a boon to the, the Viet Cong. The communists in North Vietnam were delighted that Diệm had been killed. They thought he was a very strong nationalist leader. He was holding his army and his country together pretty well and giving them a hard time.

They couldn't believe that the US government had been as, as silly as to remove probably the toughest leader in South Vietnam 

Sasha Ingber: Another aspect of this story is the fact that on November 22nd, Kennedy himself is assassinated. How do both of these assassinations change the course of the war? 

Jack Cheevers: Well, I think losing both of these leaders opened the door to much deeper US involvement in the war.

The South Vietnam government was decapitated. It was left leaderless. The generals had promised to turn power over to a civilian government right after they, they took over. They immediately abrogated that promise and formed a junta, tried to run the gov- government themselves. They were not very good at it, and they were ousted themselves by another general just three months later.

And South Vietnam, from that point forward, started to just descend into chronic political stability bordering on chaos. 

Sasha Ingber: Which was why the Viet Cong were so elated that this had taken place. 

Jack Cheevers: Yes, absolutely. By the summer of, of '63, the Catholics and Buddhists were fighting each other in the streets of Saigon and Da Nang.

And Kennedy's assassination, of course, brought Lyndon Johnson into the presidency. And Kennedy's attitude toward South Vietnam was he was happy to help South Vietnam with military and economic aid, but he was not gonna send US combat troops. Toward the end of his life, he actually announced that he intended to withdraw 1,000 US military personnel from South Vietnam by the end of '63, and the bulk of US military personnel by 1965.

Johnson was a different person, different personality. He had been to South Vietnam. He knew that it could turn into a quagmire. He, in fact, when he came back from his, his trip in '61, he told Kennedy, you know, "Let's not get any more involved in this. Let's certainly not send troops in." When he was running for president in 1964, he postured as the peace candidate against Barry Goldwater.

Uh, he said that he didn't wanna escalate the war. He tried to keep the, the war on the back burner as much as he could during the campaign. But the world became a much more dangerous place at the end of 1964, right before the election. The Chinese detonated their, their first, uh, atomic bomb. The Soviets ousted Nikita Khrushchev as premier, and along with him, his policy of peaceful coexistence with the West.

And I think most ominously, uh, uh, Ho Chi Minh started infiltrating, uh, North Vietnamese regular troops into the South, which was a very dangerous escalation of the war. And at that point, Johnson started listening harder to voices in the Pentagon who were urging him to send in US combat troops and start bombing the north 

Sasha Ingber: Which then happens in 1965, two years after Kennedy said he would withdraw those troops who were advising and providing support to the South Vietnamese.

As you were writing this over a period of 10 years, was there a question that you were pursuing, and do you feel like you answered it? 

Jack Cheevers: Well, I, I got involved in this, uh, because I was just very interested in the origins of the war. Uh, you know, the war was a very big thing when I was a kid growing up. It was on the news every night, it was in the, the newspapers every day in the, in the '60s and into the '70s.

And the more I studied it, the more I focused on the coup, um, not just as a very interesting story to be told, historical story, but also as kind of a pivotal event in the war that, that opened the door to deeper, uh, US involvement. Uh, and I think I did get to the bottom of how that happened. I may be mistaken, there may be other material that the government is still sitting on in a, in a locked vault somewhere.

But I think I did get to the bottom of it. And, and the, the beginning quote in my book is from, uh, the novel Les Misérables, and it talks about how the greatest blunders are often made up of multiple strands, and I think that was definitely the case with this coup. It evolved over a period of time. There were all sorts of personalities, conflicts, misgivings, misunderstandings, miscommunications that fed into it, and the outcome was very bad for our country.

Sasha Ingber: Yeah. And all those different strands came together into one very complicated knot. And I feel like in, in preparing for this interview, I was plagued by the what-ifs of what you uncovered. 

Jack, thank you so much for sharing your work with us. 

Jack Cheevers: Thank you, Sasha, for your excellent questions. This was really a pleasure to do

Sasha Ingber: Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. If you like the episode, give us a follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a rating or review. It really helps. If you have any feedback or you wanna hear about a particular topic, you can reach us by email at spycast@spymuseum.org.

I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and this show is brought to you by N2K Networks, Goat Rodeo, and the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC.