Saigon Military Mission II, Anyone?

Original publication date 6 March 2016: A 1954 CIA Vietnam program, known as the Saigon Military Mission (SMM), has an eerie resemblance to some difficult world problems today.

           

            Revelations from individuals such as whistleblower Edward Snowden are always a welcome insight into the inner workings of our government agencies.  For those familiar with intelligence methods, most of those revelations are probably not much of a surprise.  About 24 years ago, I had a series of telephone interviews with the infamous retired General Edwin Walker (1909-1993).  He was quite an animated individual even in his advancing years; after several attempts to interrupt one of his tirades, he finally admitted that in truth, intelligence agencies and personnel could do anything they wanted to, provided that it could be dreamed up by the mind of man and was technically possible.  Walker was genuinely and gravely serious when he made the admission.

            A past whistleblower that deserves at least a short study is the late Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (ret.) (1917-2001).  There are reasons why the super power elite (the puppet-masters of the infamous 1%) always come out of life’s political and economic situations on top, and Col. Prouty helps us with some insights into their resources and methods as well as many of their past deeds.  Some understanding of their modus operandi involves knowledge of intelligence methods; they use governments and their agencies as resources to force their corporate-controlled interests on the increasingly suspicious public.

            Prouty has had his detractors, as does his information.  Keep in mind, however, that the American Intelligence Community has the resources necessary to destroy an individual and/or confuse an issue by sowing questions in the minds of those examining a source.  This is a long-used tactic that the debate community would call the ad hominem technique.

            Prouty had an impressive past of service in the military and was actively involved in the Kennedy Administration.  Of the sources available to review Prouty’s contributions, I particularly want to point out his revelations of the covert operations and techniques used to bring about ‘favorable’ conditions for the war in Vietnam to come to fruition.  This was a totally calculated plan executed on multiple covert fronts, which began as early as WWII.  Prouty’s signature work, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, recounts a considerable amount of inside information of those covert operations and of the Vietnam War.  (He had told me in one of our interviews that his publisher insisted on the reference to the assassination of President Kennedy in the title even though its main focus was not on the assassination.)  Prouty related to me that, while working for the Kennedy Administration, he had been charged with tracking the source of military orders at the end of WWII that called for shipping approximately half of the massive war materials gathered on Okinawa to Korea and the other half to Indochina.  However, the orders were never traceable back to their original source (untraceability being a necessary method of the super power elite themselves).

            I want to call to your attention the techniques and operations that are eerily similar to U.S. and world events today so that we can see the fingerprints of these manipulators and their cronies and maybe protect ourselves from some of the commotion and destruction that their influence brings upon the world.  As I quote some of Prouty’s more important points, I want you to think of today’s refugee and/or illegal immigration situation in the U.S. and other parts of the world.  Remember that even though we and other civilized nations are more resilient than a younger country (such as South Vietnam during the refugee transfers detailed below), there is a limit to how far our resources can stretch.  These issues will eventually present overwhelming problems to the citizens of all nations involved, courtesy of our covert U.S. agencies.

            The Saigon Military Mission (SMM) was created in 1954 with both ostensible and covert goals, but the part that is most pertinent to us today is the assistance given by the U.S. to “refugees” of the north, about 1,100,000 of them, and relocating them to areas in the south of Vietnam.  Some excerpts from Prouty’s writings are presented here for your perusal.  The book from which they are taken is what has been referenced above, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, and is a necessary read for anyone wanting to know more about the covert history of our involvement in Vietnam.

            To quote Prouty:

            “[W]e had been helping the enemy of the South Vietnamese people right up until a few months before we installed Ngo Dinh Diem as the new president of this previously nonexistent country.”

            “[W]e had been arming all sides in Indochina since 1945.”

            “Diem had been born in 1901 in the village of Phu Cam.  He was not a native of Cochin China, but was from the vicinity of Hue.  He was a Catholic, a staunch nationalist, and an anti-Communist.”

            “[T]he CIA created the Saigon Military Mission and sent it from Manila to Indochina… It was a CIA organization with a clandestine mission designed to ‘raise hell’ with ‘guerrilla operations’ everywhere in Indochina, a skilled terrorist organization capable of carrying out its sinister role in accordance with the Grand Strategy of those Cold War years.”

            “[The SMM personnel] were a band of superterrorists.”

            “It must be kept in mind that the SMM was a CIA activity and that when its members said they were going to promote PsyWar and propaganda they had a different concept of these things than did the military.  They saw their role as promoting sabotage, subversion, labor strikes, armed uprisings, and guerrilla warfare.”

            “By midsummer [1954] more men had joined the SMM, and its mission was broadened.  Its members were now teaching ‘paramilitary’ tactics—today called ‘terrorism’—and doing all they could to promote the movement of hundreds of thousands of ‘Catholic’ Vietnamese from the north with promises of safety, food, land, and freedom in the south and with threats that they would be massacred by the Communists of North Vietnam and China if they stayed in the north.

            “This movement of Catholics—or natives whom the SMM called ‘Catholics’—from the northern provinces of Vietnam to the south, under the provisions of the Geneva Agreement, became the most important activity of the Saigon Military Mission and one of the root causes of the Vietnam War.  The terrible burden these 1,100,000 destitute strangers imposed upon the equally poor native residents of the south created a pressure on the country and the Diem administration that proved to be overwhelming.”

            “What Americans fail to realize is that the Southeast Asian natives are not a mobile people.  They do not leave their ancestral village homes.  They are deeply involved in ancestor worship and village life; both are sacred to them.  Nothing could have done them more harm than to frighten them so badly that they thought they had a reason to leave their homes and villages.”

            “They were transported, like cattle, to the southernmost part of Vietnam, where despite promises of money and other basic support, they were turned loose upon the local population.  These northerners are Tonkinese, more Chinese than the Cochinese of the south.   They have never mixed under normal conditions.”

            “It is easy to understand that within a short time these strangers had become bandits, of necessity, in an attempt to obtain the basics of life.  The local uprisings that sprung up wherever these poor people were dumped on the south were given the name ‘Communist insurgencies,’ and much of the worst and most pernicious part of the twenty years of warfare that followed was the direct result of this terrible activity that had been incited and carried out by CIA’s terroristic Saigon Military Mission.”

            “[S]ince the Diems were more closely affiliated with natives of the north than the south, it was not long before a large number of these so-called ‘refugees’ had found their way into key jobs in the Diem governmental infrastructure of South Vietnam.

            “When one thinks about this enormous man-made problem for a while, he or she begins to realize that much of the Vietnamese ‘problem’ had been ignited by our own people… Nothing that occurred during these thirty years of warfare, 1945-75, was more pernicious than this movement of these 1,100,000 ‘Catholics’ from the north to the south at a time when the government of the south scarcely existed.

            “[T]he SMM knew how to ‘raise hell,’ and the fury of its threats caused hundreds of thousands of this village-based people to leave. The other side of the coin—and perhaps the explanation for the relative silence of the Vietminh during this massive emigration—is the fact that among these hundreds of thousands of fugitives there were thousands of fifth column Vietminh who concealed their movements southwards within the greater mass of refugees.”

            I am sure you can see how these same methods appear to be plaguing us today.  It is enlightening to see how these intelligence methods are even keenly adept at using religious beliefs and commonality among adherents to allow themselves to be manipulated by expert intelligence methods.  It also becomes clear why our U.S. elected officials have let the problems get out of control for so many years.

            There is much more going on with these issues than what we have been allowed knowledge of, whether we are speaking of here in the U.S. or in the nations of the Eastern Hemisphere that are now dealing with extreme refugee problems.  These issues transcend our usual political opinion boundaries and are likely a covert part of an agenda to force globalization upon us.  We do not want to be insensitive to innocent victims (refugees/illegal immigrants tricked and/or forced to seek protection outside their homelands), but we also need to take care of ourselves so that we have the resources and abilities to help others.  One thing does seem clear: every nation’s people need to assert their sovereignty from the powers-that-be in the world as the super power elite force their globalization goals upon us, a topic for another day.

2022 postscript: With the exception of the Trump years, it seems this program is still in full swing and support. Note in particular the partial sentence above, “with promises of safety, food, land, and freedom in the south and with threats that they would be massacred by the Communists of North Vietnam and China if they stayed in the north.” Makes me wonder what U.S. Intelligence Community operatives are working in countries in Central and South America and what they are promising/threatening people with to get them to relocate. Even worse, according to Project Veritas, there may be an ongoing massive child endangerment program operating that is subjecting these children to atrocities using our tax dollars.

To see a list/read other articles by this author, visit steveosborn.substack.com/archive