Page 105 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 105 of 237

"General Eisenhower wanted to be assured on one paramount question," said Felix Belair in the New York Times
on December 7, 1963. "He wanted to know of the ambassador whether anyone would ever be able to charge, with
any hope of making it stick, that he had had any responsibility, even indirectly, in the assassination of President
Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam and of his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu.

"Mr. Lodge was emphatic on the point. He said he had feared for the personal safety of the two men if the military
coup was successful in that country. He said there was irrefutable proof that he had twice offered them asylum in
the United States Embassy and that President Diem had refused the offer for them both."

What was intriguing about this account was the statement that President Eisenhower found it necessary to make
an inquiry of this nature. But the former President, after all, had an intimate understanding of the tactics and
workings of the Invisible Government.

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* In his book, Mandate for Change, Eisenhower wrote: "I have never talked or corresponded with a person
knowledgeable in Indo-Chinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the
fighting, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for Ho Chi Minh."

* In April, 1963. at the start of the CIA's reassessment of its links with the regime, Nhu accused the agency of
being involved in the 1960 uprising. But the commander of the rebels, Colonel Nguyen Chanh Thi, who fled to
Cambodia, said U.S. intelligence men tried to discourage the coup and persuaded the rebels not to kill Diem.

* The United States did not formally subscribe to the Geneva Accords, which divided Indochina into Laos,
Cambodia and Vietnam after Dienbienphu. But Bedell Smith, the delegate to the negotiations, declared the United
States would abide by them. The Accords set a limit of 685 on the number of U.S. military men permitted in
Indochina.