Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
taken some steps to meet the internal security problem, he tends to view it almost entirely in military terms. He believes that increased military activity against the Viet Cong, along with an expansion of the agroville program, will greatly improve internal security. He has been openly contemptuous of the views of oppositionists in Saigon and regards them as uninformed and dupes of the Communists. Diem also has failed to take any major steps against corruption and arbitrary conduct on the part of the Can Lao organization."
After this discussion of the political situation, the estimate discussed the Viet Cong pressures as: "aggravating many of the government's problems." (Ibid., p. 2) (Underlining added) The earlier report on internal security had commented, lilt is not completely clear why the DRV has chosen this particular time to mount an intensified guerrilla campaign in South Vietnam," (Saigon 278, p. 2) and had advanced several hypotheses including Diem's view that it represented "a somewhat desperate attempt to disrupt the progress of South Vietnam," in the face of steady GVN progress and DRV failure to interfere successfully with the National Assembly elections in August. The list of hypotheses in March did not include the possibility that the communists might have judged that the political situation within SVN had significantly deteriorated (earlier foreseen as the likely occasion for an increase in overt communist activities), but the August estimate emphasized this possibility.
" … The indications of increasing dissatisfaction with the Diem government have probably encouraged the Hanoi regime, supported and guided by the Chinese Communists, to take stronger action at this time … given '… a sizable and effective indigenous guerrilla apparatus responsive to Communist control'; and 'a government lacking in positive support from its people';" (SNIE 63.1 -60, p. 3)
The estimate concluded with the pregnant comment that:
"In countering the Viet Cong challenge, Diem faces many of the same problems which confronted the French during the Indo-China War …
Some relevant portions of much earlier U.S. intelligence estimates might be recorded here:
"Despite these advance s [which included 'the relocation of scattered villages in the Delta into centralized and defensible sites' as 'an important step toward the eventual "pacification" of heavily infiltrated areas' and increases in the size of the Vietnamese National Army] Vietnam still lacks the degree of
