Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
Police states, efficiently organized and operated, have historically demonstrated much greater ability at countering insurgency than other sorts of governments. South Vietnam in fact succeeded in 1955 and 1956 in quelling rural dissidence through a comprehensive political and military assault on sect forces and other anti-government armed bands using its army, the civic action cadre, the Communist Denunciation campaign, and a broad range of promised reforms. Moreover, at its worst, the Government of South Vietnam compared favorably with other Asian regimes with respect to its degree of repressiveness. Nor did it face endemic violence markedly different from that then prevalent in Burma, Indonesia, South Korea. And its early "counterinsurgency" operations were as sophisticated as any being attempted elsewhere in Asia. In 1957, the Government of Viet Nam claimed that its pacification programs had succeeded:
"We believe that with clear, even elementary ideas based upon facts...we can imbue...first the youth and ultimately the entire population with the spirit and essential objectives of...civic humanism. We believe that this above all is the most effective antidote to Communism (which is but an accident of history)....
"...We can see that the Viet-Minh authorities have disintegrated and been rendered powerless."113
P. J. Honey, the British expert on Vietnam, agreed; his evaluation as of early 1958 was as follows:
"...The country has enjoyed three years of relative peace and calm in which it has been able to carry on the very necessary work of national reconstruction. The most destructive feature in the national life of Vietnam throughout recent years has been the lack of security in the countryside, which obliged farmers and peasants to abandon the ricefields and to flee to the large cities for safety. Today it is possible to travel allover South Vietnam without any risk. The army and security forces have mopped up most of the armed bands of political opponents of the Government, of Communists and of common bandits. One still hears of an isolated raid, but the old insecurity is fast vanishing...."114
After a 1959 trip, however, Honey detected dangerous unease in the countryside:
"For the overwhelming majority of the Vietnamese, heirs to experience of a century of French colonial rule, the Government is a remote body which passes laws, collects taxes, demands labour corvées, takes away able-bodied men for military service, and generally enriches itself at the expense of the poor peasant 'Government' is associated in the minds of the villagers with exactions, punishments, unpaid labour, and other unpleasant matters. These people are members of families' and members of villages, and their loyalties to both are strong. But these loyalties do not extend beyond the village, nor has any past experience taught the
