(UNTITLED)

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80R01720R000800020012-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 14
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 16, 2004
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: December 12, 1972
• Content Type: MEMO

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PLEASE RELAY THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE TO DR. KISSINGER FOR
HIS EYES ONLY
1. At your request relayed by General Haig, , I have taken a careful
look at President Thieu's 12 December National Assembly speech and
endeavored to assess what this speech does to Thieu's own ability to
accept an agreement negotiated by you with Le Duo Tho; i . e . , to what
extent do Thieu's 12 December remarks paint him into a corner or
constrict his latitude for subsequent political action. The short answer
to your question is that, to my eye at least, Thieu has employed a lot
of rhetoric, some of it quite artful, for a variety of diverse purposes, but
he has carefully and deliberately avoided boxing himself in. He
has left himself free to do whatever he wants to do or feels he has to
do -- and the 12 December speech (
sheds a fair bit of light on how Thieu views the
opportunities, requirements and constraints inherent in the current
situation.
2. The speech is vintage Thieu and very Vietnamese. The major
themes are interwoven, repeated with variations in different contexts,
and sometimes conveyed by elliptical allusion more than direct statement.
The nature and purposes of the speech make it hard to ''summarize,"
i.e. , reduce to the matrix. of a tidy (~t;estern) logical structure stated
succinctly in English prose. In this speech, Thieti is trying to do several
ti"li"Ll `~:i~ , in eluding:
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a. Explain what the Communists are "really' 'up to,
i . e . , put the onus for current difficulties squarely on
Hanoi -- which is where Thieu honestly thinks it properly
belongs.
b. Justify the GVN's position, explaining its
reasonableness and indeed its essentiality if -the GVN is
to protect the vital interests of South Vietnam's "seventeen
and one half million people."
c. Avoid offending the Americans or, particularly,
opening a breach between the U.S. and the GVN (which
Thieu knows Hanoi wants very much to open), but at the
same time explain why, and how, the Americans are prone
to misperceive the true realities of the Vietnam situation
and how these misperceptions generate dangerous
potentialities or pressures for disastrous actions.
d. Defuse the charge that the GVN i . e . , Thieu is a major (even the major) obstacle to peace by offering
"concrete" proposals demonstrating the GVN's flexibility,
reasonableness and good will --- i . e . , the Christmas to
New Year's truce (a deliberately vague phrase that could
be retroactively construed. as meaning Christmas to T_:t)
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the unilateral release of North Vietnamese POWs (to be
sent back to North Vietnam) , and.the offer to sit down and
discuss political problems with the NLF and the DRV
(i . e . , without you).
3. Z would respectfully suggest that you take the time to read the
whole speech carefully, line by line
text). My additional comments below presume a basic familiarity with
Thieu's text.
4. This speech is part and parcel (an important one) of Thieu's
continuing effort to do several things we have discussed before, an effort
that inevitably entails a simultaneous play to several different galleries.
First and foremost, Thieu is trying to protect what he conceives as
South Vietnam's vital interests. (Since he thinks of himself symbolically
as the custodian of these interests and practically as the only leader
really capable of pursuing them, the twin concepts of South Vietnam's
vital interests and Thieu's vital interests inevitably g et intermit-I.-led.)
Let me return to this point in a moment since, in the final analysis,
Thieu's weighing of net interest will play a predominant role in his
actions with respect to any settlement agreement you negotiate.
5. Secondly, he is trying to improve his image (and, in the process,
ilia Political position) within South Vietnam. This gets tricky because
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it involves showing that he is (1) a genuine, independent nationalist
who is not aU.S. puppet in any way, (2) capable of protecting the south
Vietnamese people, i.e., of providing the leadership that will make it
possible for them to resist the Communists (under whose rule the vast
majority of the population does not want to live), and (3) not a personal
obstacle to peace, ,which the majority of the South Vietnamese people
clearly, and increasingly, desire.
6. In the process of doing the above, Thieu has to prepare the
Vietnamese people for the psychological shock of peace, or at least a
markedly different form of struggle. His limitations (from our perspective)
may be obvious andirritating, but they should not blind us to the fact
that Thieu is a shrewd and pragmatic Vietnamese politician with a brilliant
grasp and understanding of his countrymen's psychology. He is convinced
his people cannot be rushed into a new situation, they must have a chance
to talk about it, thrash it about and, in the process, get used to the prospect
of a changed environment. (Thieu's chere is of r?se
conviction ' 1
co z._ il.~
compounded by the fact that he personally does not rush, and r sists
being rushed, into anything.) Trial balloons have to be floated. Straw
men have to be erected so credit can be gained for beating them clown.
Years have to be voiced and tangible steps taken to demonstrate that they
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have been duly considered and their grounds allayed. The heretofore
unmentionable must transmute into a commonplace cliche. All of this takes
time. Progress in this area is circular, not linear, and often hard for
the foreign eye to discern.
7. Finally, Thieu has to consider South Vietnam's powerful patron,
without whose continuing support no anti- or non-Communist South Vietnamese
state can survive. A pragmatic realist, Thieu knows this, but here three
other considerations affect his perception and are capable of distorting it.
a. At the risk of being rude, I must here be brutally
frank. Thieu does not :tike you nor does he trust you. He
is convinced that you are much more interested in getting
a piece of paper signed amid fanfare and panoply than in
protecting what he considers South Vietnam's legitimate
vital interests. Though appearances may indicate otherwise,
there is really nothing personal in Thieu's attitude. He sees
you as a symbol, not an individual, and you have become
what T . S . Eliot would have called an "objective corn, lative rr
for many of Thieu's emotions about the United States. As
you, know, the Vietnamese have an ingrained penchant for
explaining situations or developments in terms of personalized
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conspiracy theories -- the more complex, the better, Thieu
may not totally accept but is nonetheless obviously taken
with the (to us) fetched theory that there is or at least may
be a Soviet-U.S. deal afoot to establish a Vietnamese buffer
against Chinese expansion and, further, that Washington
and Moscow have mistakenly decided that China can be
better contained by a unified Vietnam under Communist
rule -- ergo South Vietnam is in danger of being sold down
the river. Ile alludes to this "parenthetically" (his word) in
his speech, and I am sure you are the "theorist" he has in
mind.
b. Thieu has another convictior about the U.S. to
which he also makes clear reference in his speech, though
in language that tries to be considerately delicate. He
believes (along with many South Vietnamese) that our under-
standable concern -- laudable from a humanitarian point of
view -- for "several hundred" prisoners has distorted our
perception or appreciation of Vietnamese reality and made
us vulnerable to .lartoi's "cunning and crafty trick" of
extracting major military and political concessions from us
in return fog.. these prisoners , and little else.
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c. Thieu tends to be a creature of habit with an
instinctive inclination to employ tactics that have
worked before and helped him overcome previous
difficulties or problems. Throughout his Vietnamese
political life and in his post-1967 dealings with the
Americans, ,Thieu has frequently achieved his objectives
through the exercise of stubborn patience, i.e. , by
stonewalling. This gambit has served him well in
relatively minor matters (e.g., keeping Truong Dinh
Dzu and Tran Ngoc Chou in prison), in far from
minor matters (e.g. , the one candidate 1971 election)
and in matters of clearly vital importance (e.g
October 1968).' This tactic beonmies irresistable in a
critical situation such as the current process of
negotiating with Hanoi in which Thieu thinks (as he
manifestly does) that his American allies need their
spines stiffened in their interests as well as his.
Thieu undoubtedly feels that his foot-draggin?, on the
October 1972 draft agreement has produced (indirectly)
additional concessions from Hanoi and 'rhos not only
helped protect South VietnauIlese interests but al ;,o
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given the Americans more than they would have (rashly)
been willing to settle for two months ago . One difficulty
here, however, is that whether Thieu realizes it or not
(and he probably does not), his understanding of the
American temperament and our political dynamics is
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far from equal to his grasp of Vietnamese psychology
and political reality. Thus Thieu almost certainly fails
to appreciate the full measure of risk in his brinks-
manship vis-a-vis the U.S. and the attendant dangers
of his making a major, possibly fatal, miscalculation
of what the traffic will bear.
8. Behind I'hieu's 12 December speech lie all of the factors and
considerations outlined above. Despite the superficial impression some
of its language may convey (and not by accident), I think the speech
reflects a very careful and deliberate effort on Thieu's part not to paint
himself into a corner. We know
agreement inevitable. He also knows that at some point he will have to
agree, to sign, or at least he recognizes the risks that would be entailed.
Ithe inevitable impact on U.S. support of his continued Intransige ance
`h:'yond a certain point. The real question, is does Thiel place
that Thieu considers some form of settlement
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that point?" The answer is that he places it where he (not we) thinks the
risks of continued refusal outweigh the risks of signing.
9. Sifting Thieu's language to distinguish what he privately
considers rhetoric as opposed to essential substance is not easy. Nly
own assessment is as follows:
a. I think Thieu is quite cynical about the benefits
or protection any supervisory or international inspection
mechanism is likely to provide. Consequently, while he
will push for the best (i. e. , most comprehensive and
least fettered) structure obtainable, this is not a vital
issue.
b. Much (though not all) of the fuss about "coalition"
is probably rhetoric, advanced to stir South Vietnamese
thinking, as a bluff, and as a straw man. I think Thieu
was shocked to see the Vietnamese tern employed for
"administrative structure." in the October draft and saw
in it confirmation of his suspicions regarding Aniericart
naivete or unseemly (hence sloppy) haste. If "hank
chinh" is used, however', I think Thieu can probably
live even with fhe.lai .gua e of the O tobel- draft, or at
least believe that this need nnot be a cr:.unch i ss-
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c. I think Thieu is much more privately pragmatic
than he publicly lets on with respect to the issue of NVA
troops in South Vietnam. For understandable reasons,
Thieu wants as many of them out as he can possibly get
out, particularly since he knows how dependent his
indigenous adversaries are on the support of a nearby
NVA presence. Thieu, however, is a realist. He knows
the North Vietnamese are unlikely to admit publicly that
they have NVA units in South Vietnam and even less likely
to sign any written promise to remove them. In the final
analysis I think Thieu would settle for a private, unwritten
sid , deal on this issue. His offer in the 12 December
speech to match NVA withdrawal with ARVN demobilization
in fact lays the groundwork for just such a deal (almost
certainly by design), Again I apologize for rude frank-
ness, but while Thieu may not trust you, he does trust
President Nixon. In the crunch, he will probably be
willing to accept a Presidential assurance of continued
U.S. support and U.S. military protection (if the settle-
ment's provisions are violated) and settle for a. side dee.l
on NVA troops that. the President pronuses to make stick.
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d. The simultaneous cease-fire (i.e., Laos and
Cambodia along with South Vietnam) argument also
strikes me as more of a throw away issue than one of
absolutely vital importance. Making the Communists
freeze -- or at least commit themselves to freezing --
throughout Indochina would be useful, but this is not
(I think) a matter over which Thieu would.be prepared
to jeapordize his future relations with the United States.
e. There is, however, one issue over which I am
quite sure Thieu will not compromise and, indeed, being
who he is and vvhat he is, cannot compromise --
psychologically or politically. There is a deeply rooted
aspect of all Asian cultures, including the Vietnamese,
that imposes a limit on Asian pragmatism: form can be
conceptually distinguished from substance. only up to
a certain point. Beyond that point, form becomes
substance, and any attempt to distinguish between then.;:
becomes mea.-ming.less in the sense of being (literally)
incomprehensible or unthinkable. Thieu would be
personally and politically destroyed if he were to sign
an agreement that elL.minat