On 2 November 1963, Ngô Đình Diệm, the president of South Vietnam, was arrested and assassinated in a CIA-backed coup d'état led by General Dương Văn Minh. After years of autocratic and nepotistic family rule in the country, discontent with the Diệm regime had been simmering below the surface and culminated with mass Buddhist protests against religious discrimination after the Huế Phật Đản shootings of protesters who defied a ban on the flying of the Buddhist flag.
The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) launched a bloody overnight siege on Gia Long Palace in Saigon. When rebel forces entered the palace, Diệm and his adviser and younger brother Ngô Đình Nhu were not present, having escaped to a loyalist shelter in Cholon. The brothers kept in communication with the rebels through a direct link from the shelter to the palace, and misled them into believing that they were still in the palace. The Ngô brothers soon agreed to surrender and were promised safe exile. After being arrested, they were instead assassinated in the back of a M113 armoured personnel carrier by ARVN officers on the journey back to military headquarters near Tân Sơn Nhứt Air Base.
While no formal inquiry was conducted, the responsibility for the deaths of the Ngô brothers is commonly placed on Minh's bodyguard, Captain Nguyễn Văn Nhung, and on Major Dương Hiếu Nghĩa, both of whom guarded the brothers during the trip. Minh's army colleagues and US officials in Saigon agreed that Minh ordered the assassinations. They postulated various motives, including that the brothers had embarrassed Minh by fleeing the Gia Long Palace, and that the brothers were killed to prevent a later political comeback.
The generals initially attempted to cover up the assassination by suggesting that the brothers had committed suicide, but this was contradicted when photos of the Ngôs' corpses surfaced in the media.
Background
Upon returning from exile in June 1954, Diệm was appointed Prime Minister of the State of Vietnam by former emperor Bảo Đại, who was Head of State. Vietnam was soon partitioned at the Geneva Conference after the defeat of the French Union forces at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, with the State of Vietnam ruling the country south of the 17th parallel north. The partition was intended to be temporary, with national elections scheduled for 1956 to create a government of a reunified nation.
Diệm was well known for his firm anti-communist and anti-colonialist stance. He and Bảo Đại were later locked in a power struggle. Diệm scheduled a referendum for October 1955 on whether South Vietnam should become a republic. He won the rigged referendum and proclaimed himself the President of the newly created Republic of Vietnam.
Diệm refused to hold the reunification elections, on the basis that the State of Vietnam was not a signatory to the Geneva Accords. He then proceeded to strengthen his autocratic and nepotistic rule over the country. A constitution was written by a rubber stamp legislature which gave Diệm the power to create laws by decree and arbitrarily give himself emergency powers. Dissidents, both communist and nationalist, were jailed and executed in the thousands and elections were routinely rigged. Opposition candidates were threatened with being charged for conspiring with the Viet Cong, which carried the death penalty, and in many areas, large numbers of ARVN troops were sent to stuff ballot boxes.
Diệm kept the control of the nation firmly within the hands of his brothers and their in-laws and promotions in the ARVN were given on the basis of religion and loyalty rather than merit. Two unsuccessful attempts had been made to depose Diệm. In 1960 the uprising of the paratroopers was suppressed. Diem was trapped in his palace, but he managed to buy time with promises of negotiations and concessions until two ARVN divisions arrived in the capital and put down the rebellion. In 1962 two Republic of Vietnam Air Force pilots bombed the presidential palace, but Diem was not injured. South Vietnam's Buddhist majority had long been discontented with Diệm's strong favoritism towards Catholics. Public servants and army officers had long been promoted on the basis of religious preference, and government contracts, US economic assistance, business favors and tax concessions were preferentially given to Catholics. The Catholic Church was the largest landowner in the country, and its holdings were exempt from land reform. In the countryside, Catholics were de facto exempt from performing corvée labour. Discontent with Diệm and Nhu exploded into mass protest during the summer of 1963 when nine Buddhists died at the hand of Diệm's army and police on Vesak, the birthday of Gautama Buddha.
In May 1963, a law against the flying of religious flags was selectively invoked; the Buddhist flag was banned from display on Vesak while the Vatican flag was displayed to celebrate the anniversary of the consecration of Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục, Diệm's elder brother. The Buddhists defied the ban and a protest was ended when government forces opened fire. With Diệm remaining intransigent in the face of escalating Buddhist demands for religious equality, sections of society began calling for his removal from power. The key turning point came shortly after midnight on 21 August, when Nhu's Special Forces raided and vandalised Buddhist pagodas across the country, arresting thousands of monks and causing a death toll estimated to be in the hundreds. Numerous coup plans had been explored by the army before, but the plotters intensified their activities with increased confidence after the administration of US President John F. Kennedy authorised the US embassy to explore the possibility of a leadership change.
Surrender and debate
At 13:30 on 1 November, Generals Dương Văn Minh and Trần Văn Đôn, respectively the Presidential Military Adviser and Army Chief of Staff, led a coup against Diệm. The rebels had carefully devised plans to neutralise loyalist officers to prevent them from saving Diệm. Unknown to Diệm, General Đính, the supposed loyalist who commanded the ARVN III Corps that surrounded the Saigon area, had allied himself with the plotters of the coup. The second of Diệm's most trusted loyalist generals was Huỳnh Văn Cao, who commanded the IV Corps in the Mekong Delta. Diệm and Nhu were aware of the coup plan, and Nhu responded by planning a counter-coup, which he called Operation Bravo. This plan involved Đính and Colonel Tung, the loyalist commander of the Special Forces, staging a phony rebellion before their forces crushed the "uprising" to reaffirm the power of the Ngô family. Unaware that Đính was plotting against him, Nhu allowed Đính to organise troops as he saw fit, and Đính transferred the command of the 7th Division based at Mỹ Tho from Cao's IV Corps to his own III Corps. This allowed Colonel Nguyễn Hữu Có, Đính's deputy, to take command of the 7th Division. The transfer allowed the rebels to completely encircle the capital and denied Cao the opportunity of storming Saigon and protecting Diệm, as he had done during the previous coup attempt in 1960. Minh and Đôn had invited senior Saigon based officers to a meeting at the headquarters of the Joint General Staff (JGS), on the pretext of routine business. Instead, they announced that a coup was underway, with only a few, including Tung, refusing to join. Tung was later forced at gunpoint to order his loyalist Special Forces to surrender. The coup went smoothly as the rebels quickly captured all key installations in Saigon and sealed incoming roads to prevent loyalist forces from entering. This left only the Presidential Guard to defend Gia Long Palace. The rebels attacked government and loyalist army buildings but delayed the attack on the palace, hoping that Diệm would resign and accept the offer of safe passage and exile. Diệm refused, vowing to reassert his control. After sunset, the 5th Division of Colonel Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, who later became the nation's president, led an assault on Gia Long Palace and it fell by daybreak.
In the early morning of 2 November, Diệm agreed to surrender. The ARVN officers had intended to exile Diệm and Nhu, having promised the Ngô brothers safe passage out of the country. At 06:00, just before dawn, the officers held a meeting at JGS headquarters to discuss the fate of the Ngô brothers. According to Lucien Conein, the US Army and CIA officer who was the American liaison with the coup, most of the officers, including Minh, wanted Diệm to have an "honorable retirement" from office, followed by exile. Not all of the senior officers attended the meeting, with some having already left to make arrangements for the arrival of Diệm and Nhu at JGS headquarters. General Lê, a former police chief under Diệm in the mid-1950s, strongly lobbied for Diệm's execution. There was no formal vote taken at the meeting, and Lê attracted only minority support. One general was reported to have said, "To kill weeds, you must pull them up at the roots". Conein reported that the generals had never indicated that assassination was in their minds, since an orderly transition of power was a high priority in achieving their ultimate aim of gaining international recognition.
Minh and Đôn asked Conein to secure an American aircraft to take the brothers out of the country. Two days earlier, US Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. had alerted Washington that such a request was likely and recommended Saigon as the departure point. This request put the Kennedy administration in a difficult position, as the provision of an airplane would publicly tie it to the coup. When Conein telephoned David Smith, the acting chief of the Saigon CIA station, there was a ten-minute delay. The US government would not allow the aircraft to land in any country, unless that state was willing to grant asylum to Diệm. The United States did not want Diệm and Nhu to form a government in exile and wanted them far away from Vietnam. Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman had written in August that "under no circumstances should the Ngô brothers be permitted to remain in Southeast Asia in close proximity to Vietnam because of the plots they will mount to try to regain power. If the generals decide to exile Diệm, he should also be sent outside Southeast Asia." He further went on to anticipate what he termed a "Götterdämmerung in the palace".
We should encourage the coup group to fight the battle to the end and destroy the palace if necessary to gain victory. Unconditional surrender should be the terms for the Ngô family since it will otherwise seek to outmaneuver both the coups forces and the US. If the family is taken alive, the Ngô brothers should be banished to France or any other country willing to receive them. Diệm should be treated as the generals wish.
After surrendering, Diệm called Lodge by telephone for the last time. Lodge did not report the conversation to Washington, so it was widely assumed that the pair last spoke on the previous afternoon when the coup was just starting. However, after Lodge died in 1985, his aide, Colonel Mike Dunn said that Lodge and Diệm spoke for the last time around 07:00 on 2 November moments after Diệm surrendered. When Diệm called, Lodge "put [him] on hold" and then walked away. Upon his return, the ambassador offered Diệm and Nhu asylum, but would not arrange for transportation to the Philippines until the next day. This contradicted his earlier offer of asylum the previous day when he implored Diệm to not resist the coup. Dunn offered to personally go to the brothers' hideout to escort him so that the generals could not kill him, but Lodge refused, saying, "We just can't get that involved." Dunn said, "I was really astonished that we didn't do more for them." Having refused to help the brothers to leave the country safely, Lodge later said after they had been shot, "What would we have done with them if they had lived? Every Colonel Blimp in the world would have made use of them."
Dunn also claimed that Lodge put Diệm on hold in order to inform Conein where the Ngô brothers were so the generals could capture them. When confronted about Dunn's claim by an historian, Conein denied the account. It was also revealed that Conein had phoned the embassy early on the same morning to inquire about the generals' request for a plane to transport Diệm and Nhu out of Saigon. One of Lodge's staff told Conein that the plane would have to go directly to the faraway asylum-offering country, so that the brothers could not disembark at a nearby stopover country and stay there to foment a counter-coup. Conein was told that the nearest plane that was capable of such a long range flight was in Guam, and it would take 24 hours to make the necessary arrangements. Minh was astounded and told Conein that the generals could not hold Diệm for that period. Conein did not suspect a deliberate delay by the American embassy. In contrast, a US Senate investigative commission in the early 1970s raised a provocative thought: "One wonders what became of the US military aircraft that had been dispatched to stand by for Lodge's departure, scheduled for the previous day." The historian Mark Moyar suspected that Lodge could have flown Diệm to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, which was under American jurisdiction, before taking him to the final destination. Moyar speculated that "when Lodge had offered the jet the day before, he had done it to induce Diệm to give up at a time when the outcome of the insurrection was very much in doubt. Now that the coup clearly had succeeded, Lodge no longer needed to offer such an incentive."