Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Fifth Freedom
reconquer their former colony, having rejected repeated overtures from
the Viet Minh, the anti-French resistance whom the State Department
recognized in secret to be the representatives of Vietnamese nationalism;
a favorable response might have permitted the Communist-led national
movement to maintain its independence, thus undermining the official
rationale for the US-French attack. US intelligence was then assigned
the task of demonstrating the required truth: that Vietnamese
nationalists were simply agents of the “Commie-dominated bloc of slave
states,” in Dean Acheson’s elegant phrase.
Intelligence sought desperately to find links between Ho Chi Minh
and his masters in the Kremlin or “Peiping”; either would do. It failed.
State Department intelligence found evidence of “Kremlin-directed
conspiracy . . . in virtually all countries except Vietnam,” which
appeared to be “an anomaly,” and found “surprisingly little direct
cooperation between local Chinese Communists and the Viet Minh.” The
problem, then, was to show how these facts demonstrated the required
conclusion: that Ho was an agent of the Commie conspiracy.
The problem was readily solved. Perhaps “a special dispensation for
the Vietnam government has been arranged in Moscow,” presumably
because Ho was such a loyal slave of his masters that they did not even
have to provide direct guidance. Later, a National Intelligence Estimate
noted that “We are unable to determine whether Peiping or Moscow has
ultimate responsibility for Viet Minh policy”; it is axiomatic that it must
be one or the other. One of the most astonishing revelations in the
Pentagon Papers is that in a record of over two decades, the analysts
were able to discover only one staff paper “which treats communist
reactions primarily in terms of the separate national interests of Hanoi,
Moscow, and Peiping, rather than primarily in terms of an overall
communist strategy for which Hanoi is acting as an agent.” Even US
intelligence, which is paid to get the facts straight, not to rave about the
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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