Tran Kim Tuyen - Campaigns

Campaigns

Tuyến's first task was to disperse the approximately 800,000 northerners who had migrated south during the free travel period in Operation Passage to Freedom before the partition of Vietnam. Most were Catholics who had moved after a propaganda campaign designed to build a strong Catholic anti-communist powerbase for Diệm in the south, using the slogan "The Virgin Mary has gone south". Believing they had made a great sacrifice to move, the northerners insisted on settling in or near the overcrowded capital Saigon, which had better urban amenities than regional and rural areas.

Tuyến decided to emulate communist propaganda techniques. He sent some elderly people to a Saigon camp to pose as refugees, and then ordered the police to stage a noisy arrest scene. His staff took photographs of the incident and distributed pamphlets claiming that communists had infiltrated the camps. This fear-mongering campaign prompted refugees to disperse for fear of being arrested for being communists. Tuyến targeted a clandestine newspaper run by anti-Diệm nationalist intellectuals, by printing counterfeit copies of the magazine with communist propaganda substituted in place of the real content. He then circulated the fake copies and then had the outlet banned for being communist.

Nhu took Tuyến under his wing and asked him to draft the rules for the Cần Lao, a secret Catholic body founded by Nhu, which consisted of many small cells that were used to spy on South Vietnamese society at all levels, in order to detect and quash opposition. The Cần Lao was anti-communist but drew its totalitarian techniques from both Stalinist and Nazi models. In mid 1956, Nhu appointed Tuyến as his go-between with CIA agents stationed in South Vietnam. The U.S. ambassador Frederick Reinhardt arranged for Tuyến to work with CIA agents such as Philip Potter and William Colby, who later became the Director of CIA under President Richard Nixon. An agency named the Social and Political Services was formed; Nhu and Tuyến used it to send men into North Vietnam to engage in sabotage and propaganda. Almost all were either imprisoned or killed. His methods led some CIA agents to refer to him as "Vietnam's Goebbels". Tuyến had an intelligence unit of 500 men, and was used by Nhu as a fixer, to arrange secret meetings with dissidents. He was a key figure in persuading undecided ARVN divisions to support Diệm and put down the 1960 South Vietnamese coup attempt.

In 1962, Nhu appointed Tuyến and Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo, a communist double agent from a Catholic background, to oversee the Strategic Hamlet Program, which attempted to isolate the Vietcong by barricading villagers inside fortified compounds, theoretically locking the communists out. Tuyến led the way in promoting the concept to the populace.