Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
behind upon the French withdrawal. Despite an ICC request to delay deployment while the matter was under advisement, TERM personnel arrived on schedule, and without ICC sanction. In 1957 the ICC protested the circumstances of TERM's introduction, but was content with requesting a periodic report of its activities.115 The same 1957 report delivered an ICC opinion that SEATO was not a U.S.–GVN alliance prescribed by the Geneva Settlement, and a 1958 report put the ICC on record (the Polish member dissenting) that the GVN might be given "credit" for the war material withdrawn by the French prior to 30 June 1956 in accepting like equipment from the U.S. 116 A 1959 report ruled that Bien Hoa was not a new military base, and authorized TERM to remain until 31 December 1960. In 1960 the ICC acceded to an increase in the MAAG from 342 to 685 personnel.117
Nonetheless, it is clear on the record that U.S. and GVN cooperation with the ICC was little more than pro forma. Convinced that the ICC was impotent in inhibiting the behavior or restricting the arming of the DRV, both the U.S. and the GVN pursued their goals without serious regard for the fixed levels of arms envisaged at Geneva, or for attempts by the ICC to regulate arms. Both governments appreciated that the inability of the other Geneva Conference powers to concert action, well demonstrated in the spring of 1956, constituted international condonement of status quo in Vietnam, and while both apparently preferred to avoid controversy with the ICC, neither was disposed to consider the ICC or the Settlement it guarded as other than a secondary consideration to GVN security.
- E. The Situation in 1956
On June 1, 1956, a prestigious group of citizens assembled in Washington as the "American Friends of Vietnam." They heard Senator John F. Kennedy characterize Vietnam as:118
"(1)...the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike...The fundamental tenets of this nation's foreign policy, in short, depend in considerable measure upon a strong and free Vietnamese nation.
"(2)...Vietnam represents a proving ground of democracy in Asia...the alternative to Communist dictatorship. If this democratic experiment fails, if some one million refugees have fled the totalitarianism of the North only to find neither freedom nor security in the South, then weakness, not strength, will characterize the meaning of democracy in the minds of still more Asians....
"(3)...Vietnam represents a test of American responsibility and determination in Asia. If we are not the parents of little
