Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
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- a. Readiness to exploit any future coup d'etat attempts in the South. (The Communists were caught unprepared in last November's attempt at a non-Communist coup in Saigon).
- b. Use the proposed forthcoming 14 nation conference on Laos as a forum to gain political agreement to a new partition of Vietnam at the 13th Parallel.
- c. Possibly establish an enclave in the Kontum area of South Vietnam, using forces forces from Attopen in Laos to do this, and start a revolutionary government there.
Meanwhile, Free Vietnam has just completed a successful Presidential election, returning Ngo Dinh Diem to office, with Nguyen Ngoc Tho as Vice-President. The U.S. Country Team has taken up with Diem's government a Counter-Insurgency Plan, mostly written by Americans in Vietnam last year. It is hoped that the implementation of this plan will solve the Viet Cong internal threat. In addition, MAAG-Vietnam has produced a work, "Tactics and Techniques of Counter-Insurgent Operations," which is being translated for use in Vietnamese military manuals and texts.
The Counter-Insurgency Plan calls for better-integrated control of the military-economic-political effort against the Viet Cong, a more effective chain-of-command, improvement of military strength and structure, coordinating and unifying the indulgence effort, gaining more popular support, changing some of the political structure, and increasing the Vietnamese contributions to the economic support of the struggle. The Vietnamese have adopted a number of these proposals, have changed some to more acceptable Vietnamese form, and balked at part of the political proposals (the inclusion of opposition politicians in the Cabinet and elimination of the Can Lao party which has supported President Diem).
Diem's actions to achieve objectives of the Counter-Insurgency Plan include:
- a. The Civil Guard (constabu1ary) was transferred from the Department of Interior to Department of Defense. 32,000
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