Talk:W. Averell Harriman/Archives/2019

Conspiracy Mongering
With all due respect, this article rather reflects some of the more wilder conspiracy theories about Harriman that say more about the "paranoid style" of American life than the facts of history. The section on the 1963 coup d'etat in South Vietnam is especially problematic as it uses only one source, and not especially good one at that. The Secret History of the CIA by Joseph Trento is far from the best book on the subject, not the least because Trento does not uses any documentary sources, instead interviewing various people. There is nothing wrong about oral history per se, but a good historian should always compare what people in interviews are saying against what the documents are saying, which is something that Trento does not do. This is particularly problematic because he interviews people whom are close to James Jesus Angleton, who accuse Harriman of being a KGB agent who organized the coup against President Ngô Đình Diệm to advance Soviet interests in Vietnam, and even worse takes what they are saying at face value.

James Jesus Angleton, the chief of the CIA Counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975, ended up losing his mind, and in the process completely wrecked the CIA. Angleton during the Second World War served along a rising MI6 agent, one Harold "Kim" Philby, who become a close friend. When Philby was exposed as a KBG agent in 1963, it so shocked Angleton that he got completely paranoid, seeing Soviet agents everywhere, causing him to get lost what has been aptly called the "wilderness of mirrors". By the time that Angleton was finally removed in 1975, he had accused the Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, the French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of all being KGB agents. One might wonder how the Soviet Union ever lost the Cold War, given the way according to Angleton it had more or less taken control of much of the West. It does not help Angleton's credibility that his main source for all this was a KGB defector named Anatoliy Golitsyn, who promoted various fanciful conspiracy theories such as the claim that the Sino-Soviet split was all an elaborate trick to fool the West and really the Soviet Union and China were secretly best friends. Later on, Golitsyn was to claim in the 1980s that the Solidarność union in Poland was not an anti-Communist movement, and instead just another KGB trick. Finally, Golitsyn was to claim in the 1990s that the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was yet another KGB trick to fool the West into complacency about their devious plans to take over the world. Golitsyn when he defected in 1961 was reliable about his information, but there was only so much he knew about the KGB, and after 1964 the CIA started to lose interest in him as he revealed everything he knew. It was at that point that Golitsyn started "remembering" all these wild claims like the Sino-Soviet split all just being charade. Golitysn continued to "remember" such claims like the KGB had planned the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 all the way back in 1961 right up to his death. He was not a reliable source after 1964, and because Angleton relied on him, that makes him unreliable as well. To be fair, just because Angleton believed something does not automatically make it wrong, but claims from Angleton needed to be treated with a great deal of caution because much of what he was saying was indeed very wrong. Angleton believed that Harriman was a KGB agent who ordered the assassination of Diệm to sabotage American policy in Vietnam, and Trento in his book seems very inclined to accept that claim. Furthermore, Trento takes at full value the claim of this Colonel William Corson who in turn claims to have gotten this information from Kenny O'Donnell that Harriman had taken control of nation security policy from the president, a most extraordinary claim. This claim is only based on information that Corson who died in 2000 supposedly got from O'Donnell, who died in 1977. To put mildly, this is not the best source of information and it does make wonder why Kennedy tolerated this state of affairs if that was really the case.

Anyhow, the version of history given in this section is wrong. This section, using mostly using Trento as a source, makes out the coup against Diệm took place against Kennedy's wishes. It is true that Kennedy did not want the Diệm brothers killed, but he certainly did approve of the coup. The Diệm brothers were not killed by this mysterious "John Michael Dunn" as the article makes out, but rather by Major Van Nhung Nguyen of the South Vietnamese Army, who acting under the orders of General Duong Van Minh, aka "Big Minh". That is a fairly well established historical fact. More absurd is Trento's claim that Harriman wanted the Diệm brothers killed to prevent them from ever coming back to power. Trento seems to belong to a certain school of though which holds Diệm was South Vietnam's great Catholic savior, and if only he stayed in power, everything would have worked out in South Vietnam. The fact that by 1963 the South Vietnamese Army was losing the war against the Viet Cong; the Buddhist clergy had come out against Diệm, organizing massive protests against him; that the coup which ousted Diệm was greeted with nation-wide jubilation; and afterwards the anniversary of coup was a national holiday in South Vietnam all suggest otherwise. To be fair, Trento is right that coup against Diệm did destabilize South Vietnam, but he misses the reason why; namely Diệm had organized his regime in such way to promote infighting amongst his subordinates in order to make him the arbiter of these disputes. As a way of staying in power, this was effective, through as American advisers never tired of pointing out, it caused a great deal of inefficiency. Once Diệm was removed as the arbiter, South Vietnam really collapsed into infighting as various interests fought it out with one another. By all accounts, nobody in Washington expected this to happen, and reading American documents from the period, there are endless complaints about why the South Vietnamese generals are always fighting each other instead of the Viet Cong. The vast majority of historians will tell you that the Americans did not understand Diệm's system and what removing him would cause. Merely removing Diệm was sufficient to destabilize South Vietnam; there was no need to assassinate him, and the principle reason why the Diệm brothers were killed seems to have been vengeance against all the slights and insults they had inflicted on their generals. This section needs to be rewritten using more reliable sources. --A.S. Brown (talk) 20:13, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Sounds fair to me. Commence thy rewrite! Muttnick (talk) 20:17, 17 July 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Will do. Cheers!.--A.S. Brown (talk) 20:30, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

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