Interviewer: I sent all the [incomprehensible] of me home to my mom.
Interviewer: Take them off the table, put them in envelopes...
Interviewer: Prove you're working?
Interviewer: Okay.
Interviewer: Don't touch the scope.
Interviewer: Okay there?
Interviewer: Yep.
Interviewer: Got it.
Interviewer: But don't touch the scope, anybody.
Interviewer: Mr. Ambassador, you can have the high chair.
Interviewer: ...married an American and she's running a restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue which is supposed to very good called Germaine's.
Durbrow: Where is that, downtown?
Interviewer: Yeah, just off Calvert Street.
Durbrow: Oh really? I hadn't seen that.
Interviewer: I haven't been there but I uh...
Durbrow: It's called Germaine?
Interviewer: Germaine, yeah.
Interviewer: And you remember Coy, do you remember Don Duc Coi?
Durbrow: Yeah, sure.
Interviewer: He died, you know, a couple of years ago.
Interviewer: Yeah a young man.
Interviewer: Gotta sprinkle the crust with water so that you get that hard crust and a soft inside.
Interviewer: In the old days remember French bakers used to play that tray out and sprinkle some water on it and put it back in.
Interviewer: And now they invented a machine that sprinkles it...
Interviewer: Okay, speed.
Interviewer: Okay, Stan.
Interviewer: What was Saigon like when you first went out there as ambassador in 1957?
Durbrow: When I arrived in Saigon in '57 there was rather a quiet, Southern provincial, French provincial town, actually.
Durbrow: Uh, you thought you were down in the Marseilles area, more or less, a little warmer, more humid and things like that.
Durbrow: But it was pretty quiet.
Durbrow: The troubles of the '45, uh, '54, '56 period with the Binh Xuyen and the other dissidents had all quieted down, and the town was beginning to be more prosperous things were going quite well, basically.
Interviewer: Have you lived here long?
Interviewer: No I got back from Hong Kong, well I was up at Boston for a year.
Interviewer: About seven years.
Interviewer: Uh, Mr. Ambassador?
Durbrow: Yes.
Interviewer: You can just answer the question, Stan doesn't have to...
Interviewer: I don't have to...
Interviewer: I guess you better ask it again.
Interviewer: Okay.
Interviewer: Say when.
Interviewer: Okay.
Interviewer: What was Saigon like when you first went there as ambassador in 1957?
Durbrow: 1957, when I arrived, Saigon was a, reminded me very much of a Southern French provincial town, architecture was similar, lots of light and sunlight, of course, a little warmer, more humid.
Durbrow: But things were rather quiet and slow, and all the troubles that had happened with the two years before the Binh Xuyen, the sect, was running the police force and things like that were all over, and a few pock marks and fighting in the streets, but otherwise it was rather calm and nice.
Interviewer: Did you ah...
Interviewer: Got it clicking and turning.
Interviewer: Something went off that's clicking.
Interviewer: Something—somebody shut a door.
Interviewer: Sorry the door closed.
Interviewer: Sorry one more time and then we'll keep rolling.
Interviewer: What was Sai...all right, why don't you just answer it and I don't have to ask you...
Durbrow: When I arrived in Saigon in 1957, it was a small...
Interviewer: Wait a second...Come on...
Interviewer: Well don't tell him to go until we're ready.
Interviewer: Are you ready now?
Interviewer: Yes.
Interviewer: Okay.
Durbrow: In 1957, when I arrived in Saigon, it was a small French provincial town, southern France, architecture similar, sunlight, hotter and more humid, but it was quite calm and collected compared to what it had been before.
Durbrow: I'd been up there on a visit year before with Freddie Reinhardt just about the time the Binh Xuyen were being conquered by Diem, the sect tried to take over control there.
Durbrow: So it was a quiet, very nice, Southern provincial town.
Interviewer: What kind of impression did Ngo Dinh Diem make on you when you first met him at that time?
Durbrow: I'd heard a lot about him from Freddie Reinhardt...
Interviewer: Excuse me, I'd heard a lot about Diem...
Durbrow: ...about Diem.
Interviewer: Start again.
Durbrow: I'd heard a lot about Diem from Freddie Reinhardt when I visited Saigon before and Freddie's an old, old friend of mine.
Durbrow: And, uh, I knew he was a very serious person, very intense, very hard working, uh, didn't delegate very much authority, and, uh, was a great Vietnamese patriot.
Interviewer: Ah, could you elaborate a little more on some of your meetings with him? How did he first strike you? Did he...Do you think he had a grasp on the problems there?
Durbrow: Yes, I think he had a grasp of the problems, uh, cause he worked too much at them, he, sometimes had down in the detail more than he had to.
Durbrow: He was a very serious person.
Durbrow: He was a Catholic who took a vow as a layman never to marry he had no family problems to worry about.
Durbrow: He worked some seventeen to eighteen hours a day too much detail in my estimation.
Durbrow: But he was a very serious person, very anti-Communist one of his brothers had been killed by the Communists during the '45, '46 period and, uh, he was basically quite pro American.
Interviewer: Did you get to know his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and Nhu's wife?
Durbrow: Yes, I got to know the Nhus quite well made a point of every once in a while asking to see Brother Nhu, when Brother Nhu was collaborating very closely with him in the same palace grounds there, in the same office building, actually.
Durbrow: Nobody could miss Mrs. Nhu because she was very much in into a little bit of everything incidentally, a rather attractive woman.
Interviewer: What kind of impression did the Nhus make on you?
Durbrow: Nhu's a very intelligent person.
Durbrow: Very intense, sincere, but more of a schemer than Diem was, in my estimation.
Interviewer: Did you feel that, uh, they could...could they possibly operate without each other, or were they totally dependent on each other?
Durbrow: To a certain extent they were dependent on each other.
Durbrow: I think Diem counted on his brother very much to advise him on things and run some of the things that he couldn't do himself, but Diem was the boss man.
Durbrow: Nhu was not the deus ex machina behind the scene running the show at all.
Durbrow: He was taking orders from his brother Diem.
Interviewer: What about Madam Nhu?
Durbrow: Madam Nhu, she'd tried to run everything, and, uh, even I know that Diem himself I've seen him at some of the intimate dinner parties we attended giving her the good old glare or getting the "please be quiet." She was very intelligent, very attractive, very active, and he sometimes he uh thought she went a little too far trying to put her two bits worth in when it wasn't necessary.
Interviewer: Looking back, do you think the United States made the right choice in supporting Diem?
Durbrow: Yes, I do.
Durbrow: I didn't know any of the others before...
Interviewer: I'm sorry you have to repeat...
Durbrow: We should have supported Diem from what I can see I didn't know the choices, I never knew Bao Dai or some of the others, but, uh, he was a very serious person, he was, as I mentioned before, a very anti-Communist, loyal Vietnamese patriot, and, uh, very pro American considering everything.
Durbrow: He didn't like everything we did, but he, he was very much on our side.
Interviewer: Now, many Americans, American officials praised Diem and he was acclaimed before a joint session of Congress because of all this acclaim he got, remember he was called the “miracle man of Asia” and so forth, did this make it difficult to get him to make reforms?
Durbrow: I don't think so.
Durbrow: We don't realize that whether it be in Africa or in Asia or anywhere where the seeds of democracy have not been planted for many, many generations, it's very hard to make the kinds of reforms that we think should be made in these various countries around the world where the mores are different, the traditions are different, the religions are different you can plant the seed, you can hope they're going to work, but, uh, we think that everybody should understand why the types of reforms, the progressive reforms we think would be worthwhile are the thing to do in that country.
Durbrow: They help, but they take time to really get embedded into the body politic so they can really work.
Interviewer: We gotta hold up there, there's a siren.
Interviewer: Let's let the ambulance go by.
Interviewer: Just got it at the very tail of this uh, you can live with it.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Interviewer: Okay.
Interviewer: Okay, speed.
Interviewer: Any time.
Interviewer: Bruce, you sitting down.
Interviewer: Bruce, just put it on the floor.
Interviewer: Okay, let's go.
Interviewer: Okay, Stan.
Interviewer: Uh, in the late 1950's, I recall that you felt that Diem was performing quite well.
Interviewer: What I remember, getting into 1960, you began to feel that he was losing some popularity, and there was also a national intelligence estimate a report made about that time that noted that he was having serious military problems and also that he was, might have some serious political problems internally.
Interviewer: What do you think was going wrong at that stage?
Durbrow: Well, in my estimation, the Viet Cong, who left about three to five thousand well trained cadres behind in 1954, which they weren't supposed to do under the Geneva Accords, hoped that they could topple Diem and take over the government in the next year or two '55, '56, in that period.
Durbrow: By '59, it hadn't worked the economy was growing relatively well, the rubber plantations were producing more than pre war bringing in several million dollars a year, rice production went up beyond pre war levels in 1957, '58 they increased again so the things were rolling very well.
Durbrow: And, uh, at that time, in my estimation, Hanoi decided it could not topple the government of the South by just hiring cadres, the guerrilla-type operations, urban type operations, guerrilla operations, and, uh, they decided they better change the thing around.
Durbrow: In 1957...'59, uh, indications point to the fact that, uh, the North had decided they better pour more troops down there, bring more equipment down...
Durbrow: And, uh, July '59 they had a very serious raid on the Bien Hoa Air Base where two American officers were killed those two officers were the first casualties of the, US casualties of the Vietnam War.
Durbrow: By 1960, in February, they had the first battalion size attack by the Viet Minh, the Viet Cong, the Viet Minh they're all really from the North the hocus pocus about being just a indigenous civil war is just so much eyewash.
Durbrow: But they had a battalion type, sized attack on ARVN Military Installation at Thai Ninh to get munitions, guns and medical supplies, and by November 1960, they had a rather heavy, uh, strike two or three of them in the Pleiku-Kon Tum area in the High Plateau and they wrecked a lot of road construction equipment because Diem was building a road a long the spine, there, to promote high purposes paralleling what was the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Durbrow: And, actually, in 1960, after all the maneuvers they had in Laos to get everybody's attention to the North, Louangphrabang up near the Chinese border is when they started to reopen Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Durbrow: So, by 1960, the military operations against the Diem government were on on a much bigger scale than they'd been since 1954.
Durbrow: That caused a military problem for Diem, wasn't that he didn't have the trained, um, troops to try and defend it, but compared to what it was before, it was much, much heavier.
Durbrow: The pressure from the Viet Minh was much, much heavier by that time, and beginning in Jan—December 1960, uh, we discovered the first Soviet air lift for supplies into the Plaine des Jarres.
Durbrow: The Plaine des Jarres is the area in Laos to the north and west of Vietnam to which the Ho Chi Minh Trail goes.
Durbrow: And, uh, first part of December we had reports that they were air dropping supplies in the Plaine des Jarres, and I asked our military attaché who was accredited to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia so he didn't have to get a visa every time, follow a flight plan and go there, he flew up there about the middle of December 1960 and sure enough, IL-16, IL-l4 Soviet cargo planes flying in over the Plaine des Jarres and paratrooping, air dropping supplies.
Durbrow: He saw one little bulldozer being dropped.
Durbrow: Took some pictures, just a Dakota was all it was, C-47 and, uh, asked him to go up there again we got more and more reports that they were building up the Ho Chi Minh Trail coming down there, and that was, uh, about the 23rd or 24th of December.
Durbrow: And this time, when he went up had a take a look see, the IL-14's had teeth in them.
Durbrow: And they shot at our plane and didn't do very much damage, they shot the rear section a bit and came through the cabin, nobody was hurt, but we got other pictures of this air drop.
Durbrow: By that time they had the bulldozers laying on an airstrip on the Plaine des Jarres.
Durbrow: So, that whole period from '59 to '60, uh, Hanoi decided to step up then military operations in a big way, open up Ho Chi Minh Trail and start putting the real military pressure on.
Interviewer: Okay.
Interviewer: Cut.
Interviewer: ...can strike question nine if you have a...
Interviewer: Okay, rolling.
Interviewer: All right, Stan, when you're ready.
Interviewer: At the same time, you recall...yeah, yeah...At the same time, you remember there was a growing kind of opposition internally to Diem among Communist opposition which culminated, in the days you were there, in the attempted coup against Diem on November 11th, 1960.
Interviewer: What was the cause of this growing internal opposition?
Durbrow: Well because the...
Interviewer: I'm sorry, could you repeat the subject?
Durbrow: The opposition to Diem from a political point of view internally, in my estimation, was due to the increased pressures of Viet Minh, more attacks '59, '60,at that time people were getting uneasy, there were far more operations against the villages they called the agrovilles in to protect the people in the villages.
Durbrow: So the people felt they weren't getting enough protection from the central government, and, uh, the unrest did grow there and that's why I had several talks with Diem on what we thought might be helpful to, uh, build up his internal situation.
Durbrow: And he did do some of those things, again, the November 11th coup scared the dickens out of him.
Durbrow: He didn't go as far as we hoped he would do before that.
Interviewer: You were there during that coup.
Interviewer: Could you describe what happened?
Durbrow: Well, uh, early morning November 11th, I lived in air-conditioned room, despite that you could hear "Boom.
Durbrow: Boom.
Durbrow: Boom." what the heck's going on.
Durbrow: You don't have many thunderstorms there like you have here.
Durbrow: So I got up and went out on the balcony and shooting and some firing going on, and, uh, my CIA station chief was Bill Colby.
Durbrow: And Bill's house was just in front of the palace.
Durbrow: Bill's a very cold, I mean calm, not cold, calm voice called up and said "Derby, do you hear the shooting? They're going up and down the street here right in front of us, they're shooting at the palace.
Durbrow: I don't know who did it, but I'll report to you." He was watching the whole thing, and I learned later, had all these kids in the family, hid in the safest part behind walls and so forth...Bill called me several times.
Durbrow: And, I would say a plug for the CIA.
Durbrow: About six o'clock, two fellows showed up from Bill Colby's staff saying "We know who it is, who did it, who started it, and where they are." And that fighting went on a good part of that day and lasted into the next day.
Durbrow: As a matter of fact.
Durbrow: Quite a bit of damage done, but not too much.
Durbrow: And, uh, the most interesting thing was that, uh, about, uh, I stayed, I spent the next night at the Chancery, I just slept on the couch in order to keep in touch with things our communications are there.
Durbrow: And, uh, about two o'clock in the morning on the morning of the 12th, uh, phone rang, and they called me and said "President's aide wants to speak to you."
Durbrow: And, uh, I knew the guy's voice so, uh, he said, "I'm calling from the Tan Son Airport, and, uh, there are five howitzers, 105, 105mm howitzers here all trained on the palace.
Durbrow: If you don't call up President Ngo Dinh Diem and tell him to surrender immediately, we're going to have to let go."
Durbrow: And I said, "Thank you very much, I will do no such thing.
Durbrow: If you've got that kind of a howitzer out there I will tell them where you are and let them go blow you up.
Durbrow: " I learned later, that this fellow had been captured by these, these rebels and he didn't want to have to say it, but they got him.
Durbrow: They said, "You call up the American ambassador and get him to call Diem and see if you can get him to surrender." And I just suspected that sort of a thing, and I said I wouldn't do it, and I didn't do it.
Durbrow: And they didn't fire.
Interviewer: Who was behind that coup?
Durbrow: I don't know who was behind it? Young, young colonels in the Air Force basically.
Durbrow: And they weren't promoted or weren't this or weren't that, or whether it was...those things can be [incomprehensible] by our dear friends, the Viet Cong, you know, they can cause discontent and plant seeds and so forth and the actual origin I never knew, actually, but ah, it didn't, it wasn't too serious it could have been serious, but they were put down rather quickly.
Interviewer: Now, it could have been serious, and we had, in a sense, put everything we had on Diem he could have been overth—killed or overthrown uh, at the same time we had military advisors with some of those Vietnamese units.
Interviewer: Uh, was there some kind of failure of intelligence that we didn't know that this was being organized?
Durbrow: Well, naturally, anybody who wants to plot something like that they're going to keep it far away from our boys as they possibly could.
Durbrow: We were, at that time we'd not gone down to the company level, we were at the battalion level, advisors shortly after in the next '61 we started going down to the company level, having our advisors.
Durbrow: And, uh, they were basically there to train the Vietnamese soldiers and not necessarily to pick up intelligence.
Durbrow: But, uh, that sort of thing, you're plotting something, you make sure that the guy that might stop you doesn't know about it until after it happened.
Interviewer: After that abortive coup, I recall many Vietnamese began to have doubts about Diem and, uh, felt that he had to reform that that coup was kind of a warning.
Interviewer: Uh, did you share that view?
Durbrow: Well, as you know from the records in the Pentagon Papers, and others that have been published, I started, before the coup, actually, in the autumn of 1960 and actually in September I had a long Dutch uncle talk with Diem you see I was there for four years and I had gone to school in France, got my masters degree in France so I speak French quite well.
Durbrow: So I could have a talk with Diem without the benefit of interpreters tête-à-tête talks and as I got to know him better I felt, asked for instructions from the Department to do it in that way, to talk to him very frankly about things we thought would help him to give a better image of his accomplishments which they were great, he did very well.
Durbrow: He didn't boast about them, you couldn't hardly hear about them, they didn't know much about them internally, and, uh, the outside world didn't hear too much about them, so we hoped that if he would be more open, talk about the things he's planning, things he has done, where the economy's going, it would be better for him.
Durbrow: So well before the coup, I had a conversation, had a long conversation with him and, uh, afterwards as well.
Durbrow: But by that time, the military pressure was getting pretty stiff in.
Durbrow: In December 1960, in January 1960, I might say, the Ho Chi Minh Trail having been opened up to a large extent in '59, I was over seeing my colleague Bill Trimble in Phnom Penh, ambassador over there, and, uh, I'd go see Bill once in awhile, he'd come see me, we'd say to each other, "Do you want to see Sihanouk, or do you want to see Diem" and we'd say "Yes or no".
Durbrow: Cause we tried to bring them closer together cause that rivalry right going on today, you know, Hatred among the generations, in decades, actually.
Durbrow: So this bit in time, January 1960 I went over to see Sihanouk and had the opportunity to ask him the question, "Your two countries want to get together, why don't you chase the Viet Minh out of the sanctuary they are using in your territory in eastern Cambodia."
Durbrow: And Sihanouk said, "I can't do anything about it, I've only got 25,000 troops in my army, there's only one road that goes out there.
Durbrow: Between us and those Viet Minh troops that are harassing Vietnam from our territory, there's a swamp area and I don't like it, but what can I do about it?"
Durbrow: And they said, "By the way, you gentlemen, if you tell anybody in public about this, I know you'll report to your government there and I can't do anything about it, I'm going to call you both a couple of liars." So he did tell us that, I knew they were there, we all knew they were there, but we hoped he would do something about it, and make life miserable for them in the sanctuary there.
Durbrow: But he never did, and they built up that sanctuary, and that's why we went into Cambodia later on.
Durbrow: They were using that territory as a sanctuary for their R and R, headquarters and everything else.
Interviewer: When you made proposals to Diem before and after the coup about reforming and opening up more, what kind of response did you get from him?
Durbrow: He didn't particularly like it.
Durbrow: He didn't, he wasn't...
Interviewer: Say...
Interviewer: Diem...
Durbrow: I made these proposals to Diem, rather down to earth ones, I might say, and, uh, I'd done it before, as I said, and I did several ones after that before I left in May of '61.
Durbrow: He didn't particularly like it, but he took it.
Durbrow: He argued back or replied and explained and tried to say why he didn't think he could do this, he'd try to do this and he made very good promises to some...and he started some of them.
Durbrow: Again, the coup of November 11th threw them off on that particular line we were urging them to do.
Durbrow: He did a few of them, but...uh, again, you've got to remember that the military pressure was getting quite strong then.
Durbrow: Talking again about battalion sized attacks, the November, December attack in hi hi tu, Kon Tum and Pleiku...
Durbrow: There's a very serious...I went up there immediately, go up to Can Tun and jeeped up to where they were still exchanging artillery fire.
Durbrow: There was a full fledged attack up there so were really at war then, and you couldn't put a bunch of worthwhile, good political reforms in when you're trying to fight a war.
Interviewer: I recall at the time, that the CIA station chief who preceded Bill Colby was Nick Natsios, who took a very critical view of Diem, as I recall, uh, was that different from your view or...?
Durbrow: I don't think so.
Durbrow: I knew Nick very well, we worked very closely together.
Durbrow: I'm still a very close friend of Nick's.
Durbrow: He's a very smart fellow, and by that I mean very intelligent.
Durbrow: And he felt like, we all felt that, he could help himself better if he did, uh, delegated a little authority, uh, didn't try to do everything himself, to give more head, more leeway to his military officers to make up plans, he could approve them, of course, but Diem had that one basic fault, among others, of trying to do everything himself.
Durbrow: I said he worked seventeen hours a day, and he knew every doggone detail, where the tax were put and where the nails were put and that sort of thing.
Durbrow: And it just took away from the possibility of him looking at the broader things and making decisions on the broader scale than all of them, including the little ones.
Interviewer: Back in the years late 1950's and early 1960's, there was a criticism leveled at the United States which was that we were strengthening the South Vietnamese Army for a conventional war rather than a guerrilla war, that we were expecting an invasion from the North rather than a infiltration.
Interviewer: Do you agree with that criticism?
Durbrow: Uh, yes I do.
Interviewer: Could you repeat that?
Durbrow: Uh, the criticism was well justified that we were building a WWII army for the Vietnamese a column of squads down the main road, the tanks coming down the main road, division maneuvers when it was a jungle area, the Viet Cong cadres had been operating there for years, they were good at guerrilla warfare down the paths rather than the roads, and in 1958, I finally worked out that we would start training the...
Interviewer: We're getting that noise upstairs again...
Interviewer: Maybe we should cut and...
Durbrow: Bea!
Interviewer: Okay.
Interviewer: There was a criticism that back in the late 1950's or early 1960's, the United States was strengthening the South Vietnamese any as a conventional force uh to cope with an invasion rather than to cope with guerrilla activity.
Interviewer: What do you think of that criticism?
Durbrow: That criticism was well founded.
Interviewer: You've got to repeat the subject.
Durbrow: I'm sorry.
Interviewer: It's okay.
Durbrow: The criticism that we were building the army for a conventional type operation, WWII or Korean type, was quite correct.
Durbrow: As I looked over the situation, and I've never been a military man myself, but I've been around in war colleges and things of that kind and had some idea about it, I felt we should do something about training them in special force type operations, guerrilla, counter guerrilla, counterinsurgency type operations, and we did set up a program of that kind.
Durbrow: That's one thing I disagreed with a member of my staff on, General Williams, he and I disagreed very much on that particular point, and others, but, uh, he was a WWI soldier, was in WWI, WWII, was a good tank commander in France and, uh, he thought in those terms rather than the unconventional type of operations.
Durbrow: We did start, I recall, six or seven, six or seven, anyway special force training camps in South Vietnam when all of a sudden I discovered from my military attaché that after this had all been agreed, of course the Department knew about it and the Pentagon knew about it General Williams in 1959, I think it was, I can't remember exact, before '60 cancelled these operations.
Durbrow: And my military attaché learned about it and I raised particular hell with Williams about it so that by 1960 they restored again and we were doing a lot of training a long the non-conventional, unconventional warfare, guerrilla type warfare, and, uh, that worked out quite well, eventually.
Durbrow: From that score, in General Williams was transferred in 1960 and General McGarr came in, he'd been the commandant at Leavenworth, command of General Sascul, and when he went to Leavenworth, he had sensed the need around the world he didn't know he was going to go to Vietnam, but for training our troops, and officers particularly, in insurgency, counter revolutionary type operations.
Durbrow: And he made all the officers at Fort Leavenworth during his three years take special courses in unconventional type of operations.
Durbrow: So when he got to Vietnam in the summer of 1960, he stepped up the program.
Durbrow: So by 1960 we were getting more sense into what we were trying to fight and how to do it.
Interviewer: Why was he called "Stonehead McGarr?"
Durbrow: I don't know why.
Durbrow: It was his nickname, I know.
Durbrow: He was a tough guy, uh, had a very short cropped hair and uh top-sergeant type of attitude, I guess.
Durbrow: But he was more realistic than Williams was in what's been going on and how to do it.
Interviewer: I guess we'll want to take that over...it's not a very important question.
Interviewer: Go back to that...repeat his nickname.
Interviewer: Yeah, when I give it, why was he called St—I mean would you repeat his name?
Durbrow: Why was he called Stonehead McGarr? I really don't know but he was a tough guy.
Durbrow: He had a shaved head and a...short cropped head and he was a top sergeant sort of a person.
Durbrow: And very uh positive so I guess he raised enough hell with the boys down below that they called him Stonehead.
Durbrow: I never did know the real reason for it.
Durbrow: But incidentally, on that score, he started in motion a study we called the counterinsurgency plan...CIP...which we worked on beginning in about August.
Durbrow: I'm not sure exactly when, in 1960.
Durbrow: And it took us abut three months to work it out.
Durbrow: It was I don't know how many volumes thick, you know how you get these Pentagon war plans and the paper weighs more than the military supplies sometimes.
Durbrow: And we sent that in to Washington about mid December in 1960.
Durbrow: A whole plan for counterinsurgency operation, called CIP.
Durbrow: What we needed the equipment and the helicopters and gun ships and whatever the heck you want to call it and it arrived in Washington just Christmas...New Year's and had to come by pouch.
Durbrow: Came by slow motion so to speak and we got the word and Christmas New Year's week that the department was very pleased with this and the Pentagon was and one thing we were very gratified...we all worked like the devil on the thing.
Durbrow: We got a xeroxed copy of the flyleaf of the thing was sent to the president...the summary of the thing was sent to the president, Kennedy and in his handwriting on the flyleaf, Why so little? JFK.
Durbrow: So that pleased us.
Durbrow: But the criticism about wanting to have, only fight a conventional war was in '57, '58, '59 even.
Durbrow: And by '59 we got the thing going in the other direction.
Durbrow: By '60 it was really rolling in the other direction.
Interviewer: In uh Congressional hearings that took place in Washington as you remember...
Durbrow: Very well.
Interviewer: ..uh, it was quite clear that there were differences between you and uh General Williams.
Durbrow: Yes.
Interviewer: Uh, in, and I recall there was one issue about who was really in charge of the mission.
Durbrow: Yes.
Interviewer: Could you describe that again?
Durbrow: Well, I arrived there in March of 1957 and I'd heard about Williams from Freddie Reinheart and he had nothing to do with the advance civilians that did the waiting about military matters and didn't understand anything except political stuff that he didn't want to pay attention with.
Durbrow: So I had runs in with him all the time.
Durbrow: So many run ins with him that I had to write him memoranda back and forth saying this is an order.
Durbrow: I didn't, don't like to operate that way.
Durbrow: Here its your immediate staff, you're supposed to cooperate saying Tom, I think we ought to do it this way, please go ahead and do it and he'd say yes or no or do it.
Durbrow: And uh so Eisenhower put out and executive order.
Durbrow: I've forgotten the number...10-5-7-5 or something like that, which he laid out the rules and regulations, who was boss man in missions abroad.
Durbrow: And uh, since the president, the ambassador...is the president's personal representative in a country, directly...that's the way the theory goes...you work through the foreign office of the State Department but you are the president's personal representative so you are the boss man.
Durbrow: And they gave...it's a long four or five pages of documents, it's unclassified, you'll do this and the military will do this and if there's a disagreement between the two of you, you’ll both send your disagreements in to Washington for a resolution.
Durbrow: And I had to do that many times with Diem, many times with uh Williams and he ah, back to the training period counterinsurgency.
Durbrow: He cancelled that thing without me knowing anything about it till my military attache told me and I raised the devil with him about it.
Durbrow: He one time in a staff meeting or a team meeting, a limited team meeting, just six of us, he...you're going to talk to me that way, I'm going to go.
Durbrow: I said, well, you go.
Durbrow: Go ahead.
Durbrow: He did and he came back about two minutes later and said he was sorry, he forgot and apologized.
Durbrow: But uh, he didn't think that any civilian could know anything about what was good for the military.
Interviewer: Why was he called Hanging Sam Williams?
Durbrow: Well, Hanging Sam Williams is, got that name when he was...first of all for good reasons, I understand...did disobey orders in WWII, I think it was the time of the Battle of the Bulge.
Durbrow: Towards the end of our operation in France, in Europe.
Durbrow: And he disobeyed orders and he was demoted from brigadier to a colonel.
Durbrow: He was a good field officer.
Durbrow: Obviously a good tough guy and ran his tanks very well and all that sort of thing.
Durbrow: So he was given a job of being the head of the guard at Nuremberg uh Trials and both those guys were hung or quartered or executed so it seemed that the head of the guard like all those Nazi...Göring and all the boys...he got the nickname of Hanging Sam Williams.
Interviewer: Did you feel that as you were trying to run the mission that he was communicating directly back to the Pentagon and actually getting encouragement from the Pentagon?
Durbrow: No, I didn't.
Durbrow: Actually what I did, I went right behind his back.
Durbrow: He wasn't allowed to communicate with the Pentagon.
Durbrow: He didn't have to get every telegram approved by the ambassador.
Durbrow: Now there's a Bill Colby on the CIA thing but you're supposed to be kept informed on matters of importance or some action might cause trouble or suggest something might be a good move to make, so that the whole team is organized and fairly coordinated on the thing.
Durbrow: Uh, that he was cancelling counterinsurgency things of that kind.
Durbrow: I don't know whether he got encouragement from the Pentagon or not.
Durbrow: I doubt it very much but I'd...I'd been the deputy commandant of the National War College for two years from '48 and '50.
Durbrow: So I knew General Lemnitzer very well.
Durbrow: By that time Lem was chairman or chief of staff of the Army and when he heard about this counterinsurgency thing being cancelled on me, I wrote to Lem and told him what I had done and I hope he would see this thing as a struggle, which it was.
Durbrow: But I don't think the Pentagon was encouraging.
Durbrow: He was just that kind of a guy and knew all about it and he was going to run it his way and not let any civilians mix in his affairs.
Interviewer: Remember in 1959 there were allegations in the American press that American aid funds to Vietnam were being misused.
Interviewer: And this touched off these Congressional hearings.
Interviewer: Could you describe what happened?
Durbrow: Well, a fellow named Colegrove of the Scripps Howard press came over there to look see in Vietnam, came to see me, had an interview with me and saw everybody else.
Durbrow: And he was very pleasant, very nice.
Durbrow: And he spent five or six days, maybe a week, ten days I guess...quite some time anyway.
Durbrow: You know, very few correspondents were there as you were saying before.
Durbrow: And there was one fellow in the AID mission we learned later that had had a little trouble with being slightly off his rocker, so to speak, and had been confined not for a serious thing but he'd had a nervous breakdown or something of that kind.
Durbrow: And he fed him all this stuff, that we had 2,414 military vehicles we could not account for, that a million dollars had burned - dollars, dollars had burned! - in the 1955 Binh Xuyen uprising, French 75's shooting up and down the streets, set fire to the building where we had one million dollars.
Durbrow: You don't carry any dollars around at all in missions.
Durbrow: You would buy checks or local currency.
Durbrow: And actually he wrote four very scathing articles about the loss of this and the loss of that and we couldn't account for that, so Williams and Gardiner my AID chief and I had to come home and spend three weeks in Washington testifying for the Congress and I'm glad to say we got a complete clean bill of health.
Durbrow: We'd made mistakes which we knew we'd made and we admitted them, but poor old Colegrove just without checking his facts just put out a bunch of completely wrong facts.
Interviewer: You remember a propos of that and a propos incidentally of the, your disputes with General Williams that in November 1960 Senator Gore said that the American mission in Saigon was uncoordinated and divided.
Interviewer: And there was also it said a lack of coordination in policies and programs between the mission in Washington.
Interviewer: Now of course you talked on the first point.
Interviewer: There's no need to go over that, but do you think there was a lack of coordination between the mission and Washington?
Durbrow: Not that I knew of.
Durbrow: I'd no impression of that.
Durbrow: We had a little problem...we thought that the Vietnamese...I'm talking about the early 1960 now.
Durbrow: Things began in 1959, where we felt and by the way Williams did too, we agreed on this one, that the Vietnamese ARVN needed more helicopters for moving troops or taking out wounded and things of that kind.
Durbrow: They had a comparatively small number of them and we put in a request which I endorsed for ah, I've forgotten...forty or forty-eight helicopters and they got resistance from Washington: they got some and they don't need them or why do you want them and that sort of thing.
Durbrow: But I felt as far as the State Department concerned, I...with the backing of...the, my colleagues on the other side of the ocean...
Interviewer: Did you think at the time that Washington took the Vietnam situation seriously enough?
Durbrow: No I didn't.
Durbrow: That's one reason why we put in the...By, when the Viet Minh started upping their military operations, all those things I've talked about already, we didn't think Washington realized what that was, that they were really trying to open up the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Durbrow: It was all connected with what they were doing in Laos, the Plaine des Jarres, I described that, the IL-14's.
Durbrow: And so they didn't seem to feel that this was a beginning of an all out military push, not just a stepped up guerrilla operations in the South, and we had a little problem on that score.
Durbrow: It's for that reason that we finally decided to work like the devil to work up a whole counterinsurgency program, the CIP program I spoke about.
Durbrow: Because If you didn't give the chapter and verse to them, they didn't seem to think it was serious enough.
Durbrow: As I said before by the time Kennedy took over he thought it was...we didn't do enough.
Interviewer: Now, up to 1960 you had said there was progress being made in assuring South Vietnam security.
Interviewer: But at the same time you requested an increase in the US advisory group, the military advisory group, an increase up to 350 men.
Interviewer: How did this request originate?
Durbrow: Well, that goes back to 1954.
Durbrow: In the Geneva Accords it was arranged that we could have in Vietnam the same number of military advisors as the French had had before Dien Bien Phu in South Vietnam.
Durbrow: We asked the French for the number and they gave us 683...I've forgotten...it may be 93.
Durbrow: It was just under 700.
Durbrow: And in the meantime we found a lot of our equipment that we'd given to the French and the South Vietnamese and it was rotting and rusting we could have used.
Durbrow: The fighting was calming down then in 1955 and things of that time.
Durbrow: So we sent another 300 men in there to (cough) sorry...to ah, recover our equipment and decide whether it was worthwhile junking or repairing and sending to Okinawa to have it refurbished.
Durbrow: So by the time I got there we had almost 900 advisors in one capacity or another.
Durbrow: We couldn't go over that limit because that was the agreement from the Geneva Accords, and the French gave that figure of 693, whatever the number was.
Durbrow: We learned from our embassy in Paris, by chance...somebody knew about the restraints we had on that particular score, the number of advisors, and said by the way I was talking to a fellow in the foreign office who said you pulled a fast one on your boys out there in Vietnam.
Durbrow: We said we only had 693 advisors...we had about 1800 or 1900 of them.
Durbrow: And we perked up then and we said kept the dope.
Durbrow: So finally many years later in 1960 the French came back and said yes, we looked at it and now we were wrong and we made the mistake there about 1932, some number.
Durbrow: So there we were.
Durbrow: We had a legal right under the Geneva Accords and mind you that the Viet Minh were stepping up their attacks to beat the devil at that time.
Durbrow: And it was more and more necessary to get the advisors in there to prepare for an all out push by the North.
Durbrow: So we devised the ICC, the International Control Commission that we were upping our number to roughly 1800 because we'd had the right to do it...whether we did, we could do what we want up to that number.
Durbrow: And this is the correct number from the Geneva Accord.
Durbrow: That's what we did.
Interviewer: And the number was increased.
Durbrow: Yes, it was.
Interviewer: Cut, please.