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"Bloodbath" in Vietnam: Agent Exposes Myth

By VVAW

When the U.S. military was getting its ass wiped all over Southeast Asia and the opinion of people all over the world was dead-set against U.S. involvement, the U.S. ruling class kept looking for ways to justify their war. One of their public-relations schemes was the statement that if we pulled out, there would be a "bloodbath"--that the Viet Cong would massacre millions of people. Then, when the U.S. was finally forced to withdraw, they still tried to say that the U.S. was right. TV showed miles of film of Vietnamese massing at the U.S. Embassy just before pullout, clinging to helicopter landing gear as the last choppers took off--all in fear of the dreaded Viet Cong.

Stories of the bloodbath were a lie. Films of Vietnamese desperate to leave the country were a deception; the Vietnamese were mainly CIA operatives and rightly feared for their lives as opposed to the rest of the Vietnamese who had nothing to fear. All this has been revealed in a book Decent Interval by Frank Snepp.

Snepp was the top political analyst for the CIA in Vietnam. He wrote this book not because he has suddenly seen the errors of his--and the CIA's--ways and wants to "expose" what was going on; in fact, just the opposite is the case. He brags about the CIA's treacherous activities. His reason for writing the book is to defend the CIA and attack people like Henry Kissinger and Ellsworth Bunker for pulling out too fast and leaving CIA operatives in the lurch. In the course of attacking Kissinger he reveals that (1) the bloodbath was a CIA fabrication with no basis in reality and (2) that those desperate Vietnamese gathered at the Embassy during the final days and clinging to the skids of the helicopters were 400 of Thieu's secret police, 400 agents of Thieu's equivalent of the CIA, 70 CIA translators, hundred of CIA file clerks and other junior employees, ex-agents, and families of these agents. Of course, their bosses had already slithered out of the country.

So what is happening instead of the "bloodbath"? One answer comes from Dr Hoa Levan, a Chicago professor of radiology, who spent four weeks in Ho Chi Minh city visiting his ailing mother. In an interview published in the Chicago Tribune, Dr Levan, who had freedom to move throughout the unified country, observed "My friends among the Vietnamese refugees told me I would be met immediately at the airport by people who would follow me wherever I went and would eavesdrop on all my conversations. It was not true...I saw no bloodshed. I heard of no bloodbath, mistreatment, or torture."

Dr Levan explained why there are still people fleeing the country; "They were middle class, I suppose, used to a better life economically. Now everyone has to labor."

For the new generation of Vietnamese the new ways are appealing; Levan described how his 10-year-old niece is "so fascinated with the government. She loves it," the Doctor said; "she gets up every morning at 5 o'clock and cleans the house. Then goes out and cleans the street. The streets are spotless. There is no longer trash in the streets.