Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group
[1] From 1955 to 1962, under contract to the International Cooperation Administration in Washington and the Vietnamese government in Saigon, faculty and staff from Michigan State University consulted for agencies of the Ngô Đình Diệm regime.
When implications later arose that the Central Intelligence Agency had infiltrated MSUG as a front for its covert operations, the technical assistance program became a cause célèbre in the early years of the antiwar movement.
During his self-imposed exile in the early 1950s, Ngô Đình Diệm met and befriended Wesley R. Fishel, a former military language specialist with a doctorate in international relations from the University of Chicago.
[6] At Fishel's suggestion, and already well aware of MSU's capabilities, Diệm requested that part of his aid package from the U.S. International Cooperation Administration include a "technical assistance" contract with Michigan State.
MSU was thereby asked to use its expertise to help stabilize Vietnam's economy, improve the government bureaucracy, and control an ongoing communist insurgency.
[8] University President John A. Hannah in particular was a major proponent of the so-called service-oriented institution; to him, it was a logical next step to expand that role internationally, and declare without intended hyperbole that "the world is our campus".
[13] A "hardship" pay incentive and other allowances that nearly doubled a professor's salary (tax free), along with the prospect of personal advancement within the ranks of academia, were also persuasive.
[15] They found a city embroiled in a dissident uprising by Bình Xuyên forces, with shelling and street fighting that threatened not only Diệm's official residence but also the hotel in which MSUG personnel were temporarily housed.
[17][18] Of immediate concern to Diệm was the social upheaval caused by some 900,000 people fleeing the communist North during the 300-day "free movement" period set by the 1954 Geneva Accords.
Funding for infrastructure projects was generally approved by Saigon in less than two weeks, and the offices could work directly with local leaders, who thus felt that their input and participation were important.
[21] On the other hand, MSUG was unable to convince Diệm of the validity of the land claims made by the Montagnards, indigenous tribesmen in Vietnam's Central Highlands.
"[22] Part of Diệm's intent was to create a "human wall" of sympathetic, mostly Catholic settlers against communist infiltration from North Vietnam and nearby Cambodia.
[24] Along with its assistance in developing the new Saigon campus and teaching classes, MSUG was instrumental in a substantial expansion of the NIA library, which, by 1962, held more than 22,000 books and other documents.
That was the case throughout MSUG, and the group was obliged to hire extensively outside the university to fulfill its contract with Vietnam, often giving the new staffers academic rank (generally assistant professor or lecturer).
Although Michigan State's School of Police Administration and Public Safety was "internationally recognized during the cold war era,"[36] it lacked experience in the much-needed areas of counterespionage and counterinsurgency, and the department head, Arthur Brandstatter, hired new personnel accordingly.
[42] With Fishel's departure came the end of the three-a-week breakfasts at the president's home that he had enjoyed with Diệm; without such direct access to the presidential ear, MSUG's sway with the administration was significantly curtailed.
"[30] As advisors, MSUG helped the Sûreté, which had been renamed the Vietnamese Bureau of Investigation in an attempt to lessen the negative public image of that special police agency, to establish a national identification card, a program launched in 1959.
[40] In part, that was because USOM initiated its own police advisory unit and took over the role from MSUG, especially the work with the civil guard, which had its hands full fighting communist guerrillas.
The 1959 contract renewal also contained a clause that illustrates Diệm's increasing sensitivity to criticism: it stated that MSUG staffers' personal records and notes would not be used "against the security or the interests of Vietnam.
MSUG frequently found its well-intentioned advice either ignored outright, or co-opted in practice; in one example among many, Diệm used the Sûreté's national identification card registry to crack down on his dissenters.
The first, by Adrian Jaffe, visiting professor of English at the University of Saigon, and Milton C. Taylor, an MSUG economist,[46] was titled "A Crumbling Bastion: Flattery and Lies Won't Save Vietnam" and appeared in June 1961.
"[47] Then Frank C. Child, an MSUG economist who spent two years as a consultant on the project while traveling extensively throughout South Vietnam, wrote "Vietnam—The Eleventh Hour," published in December 1961.
Editors Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer, and Sol Stern wrote the article in collaboration with economist Stanley K. Sheinbaum, who had served as MSUG's home campus project coordinator from 1957 until his departure from the university "for various reasons" in 1959.
[53] The Ramparts article was heavily based on the 1965 book Technical Assistance in Vietnam but, for the most part, it ignored the academic-study and instructor-training aspects of the police administration project.
Rather than mentioning the establishment of the National Police Academy and the Sûreté high command school, where MSUG staff "planned curricula and served as classroom lecturers,"[30] it instead implied that the project entailed little more than firearms training and handcuffs disbursal.
[56] Along with the glaring issue of the CIA operating under the guise of a university, an increasing number of American students and faculty began to question the use of institutes of higher learning as the instruments of US foreign policy.
"[63] Hannah's interim replacement as president was economics professor Walter Adams, who had long questioned the efficacy of university technical assistance programs and, in 1961, had encouraged Jaffe and Taylor to publish "A Crumbling Bastion.
