After breakfast on his third day in Vietnam, Kissinger again visited Lansdale, who said “that he found conditions in Vietnam infinitely worse than he had expected.” People have been fighting for 25 years and were demoralized by “constant American pressure for reform.” Lansdale called the official reports on pacification “absurd” and said the U.S. military “had not really learned from the French experience.”
Later, at a dinner with Lansdale and his group, Kissinger was given a “gloomy” assessment. Lansdale said that only two of South Vietnam’s 43 provincial chiefs were not “guilty of graft, corruption, incompetence and a complete lack of understanding of the nature of guerilla warfare.” He estimated that only two percent of the country was under government control and even “Saigon was in the jaws of a gigantic pincer like a lobster.” With the possible exception of the ambassador and deputy ambassador, the communists could target anyone they wanted for assassination. “We are watching a society in an advanced stage of decomposition and it is not easy to put things together again,” Lansdale said.
On both trips to Vietnam, Kissinger received warnings of CIA misbehavior there. The first came at a breakfast with Lodge, who had “serious doubts about the CIA operations” that focused mainly on sending “political action teams” into Vietnamese villages. He told Kissinger that he had tried and failed to install Lansdale as Saigon’s CIA station chief. He had been indignantly refused because this was cutting across bureaucratic lines. The CIA saw Lansdale as a rogue figure—and for good reason. In the 1950s, while turning a former French colony into a supposedly democratic country, he had helped Diem steal his first election with 98.2 percent of the vote while simultaneously winking at the Diem family’s drug dealing. CIA airplanes transported heroin out of Laos to Diem family refineries in Saigon. The French had financed their colonial forces this way, and Diem was following their example.
Another warning came eight months later, on Kissinger’s second trip to Vietnam, in July 1966. This time the alarm was sounded by Ellsberg, who had just driven his car, a Triumph Spitfire, through 13 provinces. “Ellsberg painted a grim picture of the situation in the countryside,” where CIA-trained political action teams were being stationed in Vietnam’s 2,000 villages. “The idea of imposing fifty armed men on a Vietnamese village under the kind of leadership that the Vietnamese were getting was simply absurd because it had the practical result of inflicting another bunch of marauders on the villagers.” The United States, said Ellsberg, was “simply shuffling dirt against the wind.”