Saigon 23126 Doesn't Answer

THE smoke lifted quickly from the broad avenues surrounding Saigon's Gia Long palace. In the bright sunlight, the pattern of violence came clear--raw shell holes, the black tongue-traces of flamethrowers, and the fine detail of the coup that overthrew and killed President Ngo Dinh Diem.

In August. Serious talk about an uprising had first started in August, after Diem raided the Buddhist pagodas. Lieut. General Tran Van Don, then acting chief of the Joint General Staff, got word that a coup seemed imminent, and felt (as he now explains it) that the moment was not right. He feared that whoever was planning the affair might not be able to control things, that the Communist Viet Cong might move in on it and take over Saigon. So Don supported Diem's imposition of martial law, and the August coup never surfaced.

But when crackdowns on the Buddhists continued, Don and Lieut. General Duong Van ("Big") Minh grew troubled. Egged on by the disturbed U.S. official community, Don, Minh and most of the key generals prepared a 20-page paper outlining proposed reforms, mostly aimed at getting the war against the Viet Cong back on the move, and presented it to President Diem. The President, said one officer, "agreed to every clause," but did nothing whatever to put the reforms into practice. Diem's determined inaction, say the generals, more than anything else, sealed his fate.

At Lunch. The night of Viet Nam's national elections late in September (at which government-picked candidates predictably won in a landslide), Don kept a rendezvous in the Hotel Caravelle bar with his old military-school classmate and drinking buddy, Major General Ton That Dinh, 36. A cocky, ambitious palace insider who affected a gold bracelet and a cotton camouflage uniform, Dinh was commander of the III Corps, which controlled Saigon. He also affected--longer than any other coup leader--a loyalty to President Diem that he did not feel. Over Scotch at the Caravelle, and later in a small nightclub called La Cigale, Don and Dinh began to discuss plans to topple the government.

There is a good deal of morning-after disagreement as to who deserves the credit for signing up whom. Don and Dinh suggest that they brought Big Minh into the picture; followers of Minh suggest that he started it all, and recruited Dinh with Don's help. At any rate, in short order the three men were the key figures. To what extent Americans knew about the impending coup is far from clear. Don and Dinh now claim that they did their best to keep the U.S. military, diplomatic and intelligence community in the dark--they regarded the Americans as the worst security risks in town.

D-day was set for a Friday, largely because the top generals met each Friday morning with Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Nhu to review progress in the strategic-hamlet program. Then the generals customarily broke for lunch together at the Joint General Staff headquarters, near Saigon airport, which the plotters by then had well under control.

Any generals who had not yet been brought in on the coup, reasoned the conspirators, could be won over by Big Minh right there at the luncheon table; if they refused, they would find themselves virtual prisoners in the plotters' well-guarded headquarters.

On the Phone. U.S. Admiral Harry Felt kept an appointment with Diem in Saigon on the day set for the coup, a visit scheduled at least a month previously. He and U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge stepped into Diem's office at 10 a.m., apparently unaware that half an hour before key troops had begun moving into position for the coup. They stayed with Diem until well past 11 a.m. As Lodge, who was to leave for Washington the following day, took his final departure, Diem remarked: "Every time the American ambassador goes away, they try to pull a coup."

General Don saw Admiral Felt off at the airport--a little anxiously, for the airport itself was scheduled to be seized in just 90 minutes. Don then went on to the generals' lunch. At 1:30 p.m. sharp, the insurgent force struck, with red-kerchiefed General Dinh bark ing the orders. Don was assigned to keep Lodge informed, while Big Minh supervised the whole show.

The generals deliberately kept phone lines open to the palace and to the U.S. embassy. The palace switchboard (Saigon 21584) and particularly Diem's direct line (23126) buzzed with telephonic frustration. With the guard barracks and the palace both under siege, Diem at 4:30 p.m. called Lodge to ask for U.S. help against the insurgents. Lodge replied: "I'm concerned for your safety," asked if Diem and his brother would take advantage of the insurgents' offer of safe-conduct out of Viet Nam. "I shall do what duty and good sense indicate must be done," Diem replied stiffly. "I shall try to restore order." He hung up.

At Church. Half an hour later, the insurgent generals called Diem to the phone. One by one, identifying themselves, they asked him to resign and surrender. Finally, Big Minh delivered an ultimatum: "Give up in five minutes or the palace will be bombed." Diem stood firm, and the generals, still reluctant at that point to risk killing him, held their final blow. At 8:13 p.m., Diem and Nhu left the palace--not through escape tunnels, as widely rumored. They simply walked out, each with an aide, and got into inconspicuous sedans. At that point the rebels had not yet sealed off the palace, were still passing civilians who lived on the grounds, and so the brothers managed to drive through unnoticed. They rendezvoused at a villa in suburban Cholon owned by Businessman Ma Tuyen, leader of the local Chinese community.

Diem and Nhu spent their last night in the Chinese businessman's villa, actually took calls through the palace switchboard so that the insurgent generals would think they were still there. Late Friday night or early Saturday, the generals called again and told Diem that his last hope of being rescued by loyal troops from outside Saigon was gone; General Huynh Van Cao, commander of IV Corps in the Mekong Delta and the last to hold out, had come over to the rebels. When Diem again refused to surrender, the rebel generals mounted the final assault. The palace fell, with neither Diem nor Nhu inside.

Saturday morning, All Souls' Day, the brothers went to Cholon's St. Francis Xavier Church, arriving at 8:45. They walked in, knelt and took Communion. The junta was tipped off by an informer. Minutes later an M-113 armored personnel carrier roared up to the church and the captain in charge ordered the brothers to get in.

At Headquarters. Saigon still hums with rumors that Diem and Nhu were assassinated in the armored car. According to the new government, which has discarded the original version of suicide, Nhu provoked the captain by insulting him, and in an ensuing scuffle over a gun, both brothers were killed. The government now calls this "accidental suicide," and it is interesting to speculate what U.S. reaction would have been if Diem had put out such a story about the death of some prisoners of his own.

According to the most reliable account, the brothers died quite differently. They were driven directly to Joint General Staff headquarters, where they were taken into a room with "several generals." Diem was handed a tape-recorder microphone and told to make a statement that he was resigning the presidency. Diem threw the microphone down and said: "I will not resign. I am the President. You are guilty of treason." At this point, Nhu leaped into the argument, cursing. One of the generals backed away, drew a pistol and began shooting.

The bullet-riddled bodies were put back in the armored car and taken off to St. Paul's Hospital. The bodies were claimed by a relative of Diem's and placed in hermetically sealed metal caskets, but were later taken back to headquarters.

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