A LOST CHANCE FOR PEACE IN VIETNAM?Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, remembering an episode that might have ended the war a decade earlier
Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, so it’s worth recalling a fleeting moment in the fall of 1963 when a rapprochement seemed possible between North and South Vietnam. The US military presence was in its early stages: only 16,300 troops were in-country, though thousands more were posted offshore. Few in America understood that a civil war in South Vietnam would soon turn into an East-West showdown between Russian- and Chinese-supported troops and US Special Forces. That fall Western journalists in Saigon published rumors that the leadership of North Vietnam, then headed by President Ho Chi Minth and Army General Vo Nguyen Giap, had been in secret contact with Ngo Dinh Diem, the US-installed president of South Vietnam. Diem was seen as a puppet of America, but that view was incorrect. Both sides understood that the increasing US air attacks and the widespread use of anti-crop defoliants risked setting off a major war between the US and local nationalist and Communist forces in the South, known as the Viet Cong, who would soon be supported by more and more North Vietnamese Army troops. Led by General Giap, that army had defeated the French a decade earlier. At the time of the secret North-South talks, Diem was launching attacks on the Buddhist population in Saigon, and the war against a Communist-led opposition hit a stalemate, which alarmed the White House. These conditions were factors in the assassination of Diem and his brother, Nhu in Saigon on November 2. Over the next decade, the United States would install a succession of failed military governments. Whether President John F. Kennedy had a direct or indirect role either in ordering the murders or acquiescing to them has never been and may never be established. He was assassinated in Dallas twenty days later. All of these entanglements were poorly understood as Lyndon Johnson escalated the war with heavy bombing and the addition of more than 500,000 US troops. More than 58,000 US soldiers were killed in combat, and there were millions of Vietnamese casualties in the North and South, many from American B-52 bombing. A key figure in the possible early settlement of the war, without American involvement, was a Polish diplomat named Mieczyslaw Maneli. He served intermittently on an international peacekeeping group set up in 1954, when North and South Vietnam were divided at an international summit in Geneva. The group was known as the International Control Commission. It included communist, democratic, and neutral members—Polish, Canadian, and Indian—and had offices in Hanoi and Saigon. Maneli was the Polish representative on the ICC on and off over the next two decades. He was a Jew who as a teenager escaped the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II and fought against the Nazis. He was captured and interned in the worst of the Gestapo torture chambers. After the war he was recognized as a hero by the Communist leadership. By 1954, Maneli had earned a doctorate in law and was an associate professor at University of Warsaw. A prolific scholar and writer, he grew more and more hostile to Soviet postwar political control of Poland. He was saved from harassment or worse at the hands of the rigid Community Party leadership by being appointed to the ICC. In the late 1960s, Maneli fled Poland for the United States and became a professor in political science at Queens College in New York City. He died of a heart attack in 1994. I knew nothing of Maneli until I began researching a book on the Kennedy presidency in the 1990s. I had published the first account of the My Lai massacre as a freelancer in 1969 and continued writing about the war for the New Yorker and the New York Times. I became friendly with some inside the US government and intelligence community who served in Vietnam and hated what the US was doing: targeting peasant communities in the countryside to generate alleged Viet Cong body counts for the generals running the war. President Johnson refused to make serious peace offers to end the slaughter. Maneli published an essay in the New York Times in 1975 as the war was in its last stages. He revealed that in 1963 President Diem and the French ambassador to South Vietnam asked him to approach the leadership in Hanoi to discuss resolving the war. There was talk of renewing the exchange of mail and the trade of rice to the North in return for industrial goods. Maneli published a memoir in 1971 with Harper & Row, War of the Vanquished, that provided what I would learn years later was a selective account of his role as a go-between trying to end a war that would kill millions. I could find no reviews of the book and no mention of it at the time it was published. I would come to understand that Maneli’s account of his years in Vietnam was the prototype of a Cold War story—of the sort John le Carré told so vividly—of good intelligence that was inconvenient for those in charge. Maneli’s childhood was wiped out by the Nazis and he hoped after the war that life under Communism would provide political freedom. The dicta from Moscow proved otherwise, and eventually the disillusioned Maneli came to believe that America could be the answer. He was approached a few years after the war by Ted Shackley, a young US Army counterintelligence officer, and recruited as a paid asset. Shackley’s mother was Polish, and he was fluent in the language. He left the Army to join the CIA when it came into being in 1947. He went on to have a successful career with the agency. He would play a key role during the Kennedy administration in support of the anti-Castro operations in Cuba that were so valued by Kennedy and his brother Bobby. He later served as station chief in Saigon. I talked to Shackley many times after he retired in the mid-1970s and never heard a word about Maneli. Of course not. I did not learn Maneli’s secret—the one he dared not tell in his memoir or in the New York Times—that all of his actions in the early 1960s were conducted with the knowledge and direction of John Richardson, the CIA’s station chief in Saigon who understood in the early 1960s that the war could not be won. Maneli was still on the CIA payroll at the time. I knew there was something I needed to hear from Richadson for my book on Kennedy, but by the time I got to him he was near death. Maneli had suffered his fatal heart attack by then, and I could never find his daughter, who was working for the city of New York. I did find his son years later: he was a businessman living in Texas. We talked, though he was reluctant, and I asked him if he knew his father was a CIA asset. His answer still rings in my year. “Mr. Hersh, I’ve known what to say on the telephone since I was seven years old.” The Vietnam War went on after the assassinations of Diem and Kennedy until the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops successfully stormed Saigon and the US Embassy fifty years ago. Maneli’s spying on North Vietnam and his attempt to bring about an early settlement to the war—if that was what he was doing—via a separate peace agreement between North and South Vietnam would never have worked. There was no chance that Kennedy, facing re-election the next year, would withdraw his troops and stop the war against the Viet Cong and North Vietnam because Diem wanted to partner with America’s enemies. Could it be that Maneli—for all of his whispered talk in those tense days in November of 1963 about the secrets doings of Ngo Dinh Diem in talks with Ho Chi Minh, joining forces to end the war and prompting the Kennedy administration to flee South Vietnam—was actually doing the bidding of the Americans who had been paying him for decades? Was Maneli’s real goal to make it easier for Kennedy to justify overthrowing Diem, a fellow Catholic, and his brother, who were found to be secretly conspiring with Ho Chi Minh? Such treachery, known throughout official Saigon that fall, would justify the extreme means that were used to end the Diem regime. Writing this essay, I kept on remembering a line that Ho Chi Minh told Maneli early on when the talk turned to the peace process: “Mr. Maneli, our real enemies are the Americans. Get rid of them and we can cope with Diem afterward.” Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy Seymour Hersh, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe. © 2025 Seymour Hersh |