Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
- "The Department of State believes that within the limitations imposed by existing commitments and strategic priorities, the resources of the United States should be deployed to reserve Indochina and Southeast Asia from further Communist encroachment. The Department of State has accordingly already engaged all its political resources to the end that this object be secured. The Department is now engaged in the process of urgently examining what additional economic resources can effectively be engaged in the same operation.
- "It is now, in the opinion of the Department, a matter of the greatest urgency that the Department of Defense assess the strategic aspects of the situation and consider, from the military point of view, how the United States can best contribute to the prevention of further Communist encroachment in that area."29
In a memorandum for the President of March 6, 1950, the Secretary of Defense described U.S. options as follows:
- "The French are irrevocably committed in Indochina and are supporting the three states as a move aimed at achieving non-Communist political stability... The choice confronting the United States is to support the legal governments in Indochina or to face the extension of Communism over the remainder of the continental area of Southeast Asia and possibly westward..."30
- b. The Griffin Mission
While the choice among alternatives awaited provision of the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military departments,31 the Secretary of State sent to the Far East "the Griffin Mission," which was given the task of surveying "the kinds and approximate value of assistance needed"32 in Indochina (among other countries). Departing when it did, some five months following the fall of Rationalist China, and headed by the former Deputy Chief of the Aid Mission to Mainland China, the Griffin Mission was probably intended to avoid further attacks on the State Department's Asia policy as well as to determine how U.S. economic resources might effectively be employed in Southeast Asia.
On March 22, the Griffin Mission report recommended U.S. aid for a program of rural rehabilitation, the provision of limited amounts of commodities and industrial equipment, and a program of technical assistance. These measures were estimated to cost $23.5 million for the period through June, 1951. The mission also recommended the "psychological shock of ships with military aid material in the immediate future"33 as a measure to dramatize the U.S. commitment to those on the scene.
- c. JCS Views
On April 5, the Joint Chiefs of Staff responded to a request by the Secretary of Defense with recommendations for measures which, from
