Pham Ngoc Thao

Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo (1922–1965), a major provincial leader in South Vietnam and infiltrator of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, was a communist agent of the North Vietnamese Vietminh. As the overseer of Ngo Dinh Nhu's Strategic Hamlet Program in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he deliberately forced the program forward at unsustainable speeds, constructing poorly-equipped and poorly-defended villages, in order to foster resentment against the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem.

Through intrigue, Thao also helped destabilise and ultimately unseat two South Vietnamese regimes—Diem's and the military "junta" of Nguyen Khanh. As the Diem regime began to unravel in 1963, Thao was one of many officers who planned a "coup d'état". Although Thao's plot was ultimately integrated into the successful plot, his activities promoted infighting which weakened the government and distracted the military from fighting the Vietcong insurgency. Throughout 1964 and 1965, as South Vietnam was struggling to establish a stable state after the ouster of Diem, Thao was involved in several intrigues and coup plots which diverted the government and army's efforts to fight the Vietcong. In 1965, he went into hiding after a failed attempt to overthrow the regime of Khanh and was sentenced to death "in absentia". Although this "coup d'état" also failed, the subsequent chaos forced Khanh's "junta" to collapse.

Thao died the same year he was forced into hiding; he is believed to have been murdered after a bounty was placed on his head. After Vietnam was reunified at the end of the Vietnam War, the victorious North Vietnamese claimed Thao as one of their own communists and posthumously made him a general.

Early Vietminh years

Born Phạm Ngọc Thuần, Thao was one of eleven children in a northern Vietnamese Roman Catholic family. The family held French citizenship but were anti-French; Thao's father, an engineer, once headed an underground communist organisation in Paris which assisted the Vietminh's anti-French pro-independence activities outside Vietnam. After attending French schools in Saigon, Thuan changed his named to Thao and renounced his French citizenship. Thao spent his teenage years obsessed with his motorcycle before participating in Ho Chi Minh's revolutionary campaigns for Vietnamese independence and joining the Vietminh.

In September 1945, Ho declared independence under the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) following the withdrawal of Imperial Japan, which had seized control of the country from France during the Second World War. After the end of the Second World War, France attempted to reassert control over its colony and fighting broke out. [Jacobs, pp. 21–23.] Thao moved to southern Vietnam during the war against French rule from 1946 to 1954. As a leader of the resistance, he was allocated the responsibility of indoctrinating the 1947 batch of recruits with Vietminh ideology. One of Thao's students was his future enemy, South Vietnamese General and President Nguyen Khanh. By 1949, he was in charge of the Vietminh espionage apparatus around Saigon and organised the guerrilla companies in the countryside. Following the French defeat in 1954 at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, Thao helped evacuate communist fighters from South Vietnam and Cambodia in accordance with the accords of the Geneva Conference. Under the accords, Vietnam was to be temporarily divided at the 17th parallel, pending national elections to reunify the country in 1956, and military personnel were to be evacuated to their respective sides of the border. In the meantime, Ho's Vietminh controlled the north under the DRV while the south was under the French sponsored State of Vietnam. [Jacobs, pp. 40–41.] [cite book| first=Richard |last=Lindholm| year=1959| title= Viet-nam, the first five years: an international symposium|publisher=Michigan State University Press|pages=pp. 48–50]

However, Thao remained in the anti-communist south when Vietnam was partitioned and made a show of renouncing communism. He became a schoolteacher and later worked in a bank. He consistently refused to turn in the names of his former comrades in arms, claiming that they were merely patriots fighting against the French and were not communists.Shaplen, pp. 309–310.] Langguth, pp. 160–162.] In October 1955, Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem ousted Emperor Bao Dai in a fraudulent referendum to determine the future of the State of Vietnam. Diem declared himself president of the newly proclaimed Republic of Vietnam. [Jacobs, p. 85.] Diem scrapped the national elections, citing that South Vietnam was not a signatory to the accords of the Geneva Conference. This prevented reunification and Thao was permanently ensconced in the south. [Jacobs, p. 98.]

Undercover communist in the South Vietnamese army

[
Ngo Dinh Diem.] The American-backed Diem was a passionate anti-communist. He initiated an "Anti-Communist Denunciation Campaign" to root out Vietminh members and their sympathisers in South Vietnam. Thousands of people were killed or jailed, but in time, Diem's campaigns caused more sympathy for the Vietminh. Before 1960, various small-scale pro-Communist uprisings occurred in the countryside. [Jacobs, p. 90.] In December 1960, North Vietnam's Politburo authorised the creation of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, popularly known as the Vietcong. The NLF was dominated by communists, but portrayed itself as a nationalist militant organisation, stating its aim to be the "reunification of the fatherland" with the overthrow of the "disguised colonial regime of the U.S. imperialists and the dictatorial Ngo Dinh Diem administration." The creation of the Vietcong marked an escalation in the scale and organisation of the insurgency that developed into the Vietnam War. [Jacobs, pp. 119–121.]

Thao's family's Catholic connections, namely Diem's brother Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, helped Thao rise in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Thuc put Thao in touch with Tran Kim Tuyen, who was in charge of intelligence operations under Diem's brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, who was the head of the secret police and ARVN Special Forces. Thao began as a propagandist for various units of the army and for the secret Catholic Can Lao Party. The Can Lao's system of informants and secret cells helped create the atmosphere of a police state and maintain the Ngo family's grip on power.

As a result of his family's Catholic connections, Thao rose steadily in the ARVN, since Diem’s regime promoted officers primarily on religious preference and loyalty. Nhu sent him to Malaysia to study counterinsurgency techniques, and upon his return Thao became a vital part of Nhu’s efforts to purge the army of disloyal officers. He rose even further when the troops he commanded helped put down the November 1960 coup attempt. He was promoted to the post of chief of Ben Tre Province, where he covertly worked with the cadres of Nguyen Thi Dinh, a Vietcong leader who later became the highest ranking female communist in post-war reunified Vietnam. In one operation by Thao’s ARVN forces, American field journalists covering the battle saw their hours-long attempt to box in a Vietcong battalion yield only one farmer who lived in a hut with antigovernment slogans. Despite this, the American journalists and Vietnamese officers remained unaware that Thao was a double agent.

Strategic Hamlet Program

In 1962, Nhu began work on the ambitious Strategic Hamlet Program, an attempt to build "fortified villages" that would be secure zones for rural Vietnamese where the Vietcong could not operate. Thao supervised these efforts, and when told that the peasants resented being forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and put into forts which they were forced to build, he advised Nhu and Tuyen that it was imperative to build as many hamlets as fast as possible. [Karnow, p. 274.] Thao specifically had villages built in areas that he knew had a strong Vietcong presence. This increased the number of communist sympathisers who were placed inside the hamlets and given identification cards. As a result, the Vietcong were able to more effectively penetrate the villages to access supplies and villagers. [Jacobs, p. 127.] [Langguth, pp. 168–169.]

Later in 1962, United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara toured South Vietnam with Diem and Thao. Perhaps because Thao divulged the tour details to Vietcong guerrillas, each of McNamara’s stopovers was punctuated by bloody attacks on nearby ARVN installations. For example, when McNamara was in Binh Duong Province, five government soldiers were killed. As he flew from Da Lat north to Da Nang near the demilitarised zone, he was greeted by a Vietcong bombing of a southbound troop train which killed 27 and wounded 30 Civil Guard members. [Langguth, p. 175.]

The fall of Diem

In 1963, the Diem regime began to lose its tight control over the country as civil unrest spread as a result of the Buddhist crisis. Large scale demonstrations by the Buddhist majority erupted in response to the government shootings of nine Buddhists in Huế who were protesting against a ban on the flying of the Buddhist flag during Vesak, the birthday of Gautama Buddha. [Jacobs, pp. 142–144.] With Diem remaining intransigent in the face of Buddhist demands for religious equality, sections of society began calling for his removal from power. Thao was part of the many plots that engulfed Saigon, destabilising the regime. Aiming for a 15 July "coup d'état", Tuyen consulted with Thao regarding his plans, but Tuyen was too closely associated with Nhu to recruit the necessary military aid and he was subsequently exiled by Nhu.Shaplen, pp. 197–198.] Tuyen's group ended up being led by Thao but his initial coup plans were shelved when American CIA agent Lucien Conein instructed Thao's superior, General Tran Thien Khiem, to stop the "coup" on the grounds that it was premature. [Karnow, p. 300.] Thao's motivation for involvement in the plotting is generally attributed to communist instructions for him to cause infighting within the ARVN whenever possible. Thao resumed plotting, intending to stage the "coup" on 24 October. He had recruited various infantry, marine and paratroop units in his plotting, totalling 3000 men. [Karnow, p. 317.] Thao's group did not carry out the "coup d'état" after senior generals persuaded him to integrate his forces into their larger group, which was more likely to succeed. The "coup" was successfully executed on 1 November 1963 under the leadership of Generals Duong Van Minh and Tran Van Don. [Shaplen, p. 205.]

Thao commanded around two dozen tanks, which formed a column in the streets surrounding the Presidential Palace at midnight, and helped launch the full scale attack at 03.30 on 2 November. The rebels eventually gained control of the building, and at daybreak Thao's forces stormed the palace, but found it empty; Diem and Nhu had escaped. A captured officer of the Presidential Guard revealed to Thao where the brothers were hiding and under the orders of Khiem, Thao went after them. Khiem ordered Thao to ensure that the brothers were not physically harmed. [cite book| title=A Death in November| first=Ellen J.|last=Hammer| year=1987 |publisher=E. P. Dutton|isbn=0-525-24210-4|pages=p. 292 |authorlink=Ellen Hammer] Thao arrived at the house in Cholon where the brothers were purportedly hiding and phoned the rebels back at the palace. Diem and Nhu were apparently listening in on an extension in another room and escaped. [Shaplen, pp. 209–210.] The brothers subsequently surrendered to an ARVN convoy led by General Mai Huu Xuan at a nearby Catholic church and were executed "en route" to military headquarters despite being promised safe exile. [Jacobs, p. 180.]

Participation in military junta

After the fall of Diem, Thao was designated by the head of state Minh and the civilian Prime Minister Nguyen Ngoc Tho to create the nucleus of a group called the Council of Notables, and promote it to the public. which, as an interim body of prominent civilians, would advise the military "junta" before it handed over power to an elected legislature under civilian rule. The Council of fifty-eight men and two women held its first meeting on 1 January 1964 at Dien Hong Palace in Saigon. The council was comprised almost entirely of well-known professionals and academics and, as such, was hardly representative of South Vietnamese society; there were no delegates from the agricultural or labour sectors of the economy. It gained a reputation for being a forum of debate, rather than a means of enacting policy change and government programs for the populace. Tho and Minh assigned Thao with the task of encouraging a transition to democracy by facilitating the formation of a few political parties. This was ineffective, as many political parties with only a handful of members sprang up and squabbled. Within 45 days of the coup, 62 parties had formed but nothing meaningful resulted. In the end, these efforts proved to be irrelevant as Minh's junta and the accompanying Council of Notables were overthrown before the end of the month. [Shaplen, pp. 224–226.]

The generals sent Thao to Fort Leavenworth in the United States for six months in order to learn conventional warfare tactics. He also spent a month in England before returning to Vietnam. By this time, Minh's "junta" had been replaced in a 1964 January coup by Khanh. Khanh appointed Thao to be his press officer as well as an unofficial political adviser. By the end of the year, Khanh became involved in a power struggle with his deputy, General Tran Thien Khiem as well as Minh, who had been retained as the titular head of state. Thao was a close friend of Khiem, so when Khanh prevailed in the power struggle, Khanh despatched Khiem to Washington as the ambassador with Thao was his press attaché. In late December 1964, Thao was summoned back to Saigon by Khanh. Thao suspected that Khanh was attempting to have him killed, while Khanh thought that Thao and Khiem were plotting against him. Fearing that he would be arrested upon arrival, Thao attempted to outmanoeuvre Khanh and immediately went underground upon returning to Saigon. In mid-January 1965, the regime called for him to report to his superiors in the ARVN, warning that he would be "considered guilty of abandoning his post with all the consequences of such a situation" if he failed to do so. [Shaplen, pp. 308–309.]

1965 attempted coup and death

Between January and February, Thao began plotting his own counter-coup. Shortly before noon on 19 February, he used around fifty tanks, their crew and a mixture of infantry battalions with whom he had prior connections to seize control of the military headquarters, the post office and the radio station of Saigon. He surrounded the homes of General Khanh and head of state Phan Khac Suu. Khanh managed to escape and flee to Vung Tau. Thao made a radio announcement stating that the sole objective of his military operation was to get rid of Khanh, whom he described as a "dictator". He said that he intended to recall Khiem to Saigon to lead the Armed Forces Council in place of Khanh, but would retain the civilian cabinet which answered to the generals. Thao did this in league with General Lam Van Phat, who was supposed to seize the Bien Hoa airfield to prevent Air Force chief Nguyen Cao Ky from mobilising air power against them. The attempt to seize Bien Hoa failed, and Ky circled Tan Son Nhut airbase, the military headquarters, threatening to bomb the rebels. At 8 pm, Phat and Thao met Ky in a meeting organised by the Americans, and insisted that Khanh be removed from power. The coup collapsed when, around midnight, loyal ARVN forces swept into the city from the south and some loyal to Ky from Bien Hoa in the north. Before fleeing, Thao managed to broadcast a "final message to the nation" on radio, stating that the coup had been effective in removing Khanh. This was not the case, but the chaos lead the Armed Forces Council to adopt a vote of no confidence in Khanh and Ky assumed control. [Shaplen, pp. 310–312.]

While in hiding, Thao expressed his willingness to surrender and cooperate with the government of Phan Huy Quat, if he and approximately fifty officers involved in the coup were granted amnesty. He also offered to go into exile in the United States, where his family had moved when he was sent there for training in 1964. [Shaplen, pp. 321–322.] In May 1965, a military tribunal sentenced both Thao and Phat to death "in absentia". The death sentence was attributed to the influence of General Nguyen Chanh Thi, who was a rival of Thao and had assigned hit squads to look for him. After the conclusion of the trial, it was announced that the Armed Forces Council would disband and give the civilians more control in running the government. Thi was believed to have agreed to the transfer of power to a civilian government in return for Thao's death. As a result, Thao had little choice but to attempt to seize power in order to save himself and he and Thi began to manoeuvre against one another.

On 20 May, a half dozen officers and around forty civilians, predominantly Catholic, were arrested on the charges of attempting to assassinate Quat and kidnap Thi and Ky. Several of the arrested were known supporters of Thao and believed to be abetting him in evading the authorities. Despite this, Thao himself managed to escape, even as a USD 30,000 bounty was put on him by the "junta". In July 1965, he was reported dead in unclear circumstances; an official report claimed that he died of injuries "en route" to Saigon, while on a helicopter after being captured north of the city. However, it is generally assumed by historians and military analysts that he was murdered on the orders of some figures in the military.Shaplen, pp. 338–344.] After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, another less-accepted theory emerged, maintaining that he went underground and worked in counterintelligence for the Central Office of South Vietnam, helping to hunt down Vietcong cadres.

Thao was posthumously promoted by the ARVN to the rank of one–star general and awarded the title of "Heroic war dead" ( _vi. Liệt sĩ). After the Fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, the Communist government awarded him the same title and paid war pensions to his family.cite book|title=Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War| first= Spencer C. |last=Tucker |year=2000 |publisher=ABC-CLIO| pages =p. 325| isbn=1-57607-040-0] In 1981, the communists had his body exhumed and reburied in the "Patriots' cemetery" in Ho Chi Minh City (previously Saigon). [Karnow, p. 39.]

Notes

References

*cite book| first=Seth |last=Jacobs| year=2006| title=Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America's War in Vietnam, 1950–1963| publisher=Rowman & Littlefield Publishers| isbn=0-7425-4447-8
*cite book| title=Vietnam: A history| first=Stanley |last=Karnow |authorlink=Stanley Karnow| year=1997 |publisher=Penguin Books | isbn=0-670-84218-4
*cite book| title=Our Vietnam| first=A. J. |last=Langguth |year=2000 |publisher=Simon and Schuster | isbn=0-684-81202-9
*cite book|first=Robert |last=Shaplen| title=The lost revolution: Vietnam 1945–1965 | year=1965 |publisher=Andre Deutsch

Persondata
NAME = Phạm, Ngọc Thảo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES =
SHORT DESCRIPTION = Provincial leader in South Vietnam
DATE OF BIRTH = 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH =
DATE OF DEATH = 1965
PLACE OF DEATH =