The Diem Document

With South Viet Nam's presidential election coming up in October, it would seem that the potential candidates have plenty of immediate issues to argue about. But currently the hottest issue in the campaign is an episode from the past: the coup that ended with the murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu back in 1963.

The issue was raised by the man who led the Diem coup: Duong Van ("Big") Minh, a former general and one of the chief rivals of President Nguyen Van Thieu, who last week formally declared his candidacy. Two weeks ago, Minh told some reporters that Thieu was at least partially responsible for the killing of the brothers. As Minh told it, Thieu, then a colonel in command of the South Vietnamese 5th Division, was to surround Saigon's cream-colored Gia Long Palace and "protect the life of President Diem" by taking him into custody. But Thieu got to the palace too late, Minh said, and the Ngos had already slipped away. Their bodies turned up the following day, bound and bullet-riddled, inside a South Vietnamese army personnel carrier.

Last week it was Thieu's turn. In a Saigon press conference, he called Big Minh "a coward and a liar" and blamed him for the murders, quoting him as saying at the time of the coup that "the easiest way is to assassinate Diem."

Doomed Brothers. Why the debate? Minh might have been trying to minimize the damage he stands to suffer when the text of a long-secret 1964 post-mortem on the coup hits the newsstands in Saigon. The document, whose authenticity has not been verified by any of the principals involved, is a transcript of a tape of an alleged informal two-day "trial" of the coup leaders held in March 1964 by Nguyen Khanh, the stumpy general who overthrew the Minh junta three months after the Diem coup because he feared it was going "neutralist."

This week the Vietnamese daily Hoa Binh plans to publish the first of 30 installments of the transcript, purchased from a South Vietnamese lieutenant colonel who saw a chance to profit by the example of the Pentagon papers. Though Minh has long cast himself as a man untainted by involvement with the U.S. in general and with the blood of the Ngos in particular, the Diem document supports a fact well established in the Pentagon papers: that Americans had been in contact with Minh's group before the coup. It also implies that Minh knew that the brothers were doomed. According to the transcript, Minh told Khanh "even though we knew it was inhuman to kill Diem and Nhu, we had to kill them both. Should the coup have failed, what would have happened to us?"

Other tidbits from the transcript:

> Questioned about $6,000 in U.S. currency that had allegedly been found in the palace when it was captured, Big Minh said it had been spent, but he could not recall how, why or by whom. Nor could anyone recall what had happened to twelve kilos of gold, worth $15,000, supposedly taken from a third Ngo brother, Ngo Dinh Can, after the coup.

> General Do Cao Tri, the flamboyant III Corps commander who died in a helicopter smash-up last February, accused then General (and former Senator) Tran Van Don of being "round"--a Vietnamese term of contempt for someone who will roll in any direction.

> Toward the end of the trial a newly promoted general named Nguyen Cao Ky said indignantly: "As I listen to all of the charges against [some of the lower-ranking] generals--dirty, sleeping with the wives of the soldiers, corrupt, disloyal, dishonest--I think we should get rid of them." The performance reflects so favorably on Ky. who is also a candidate for the presidency, that some cynics have suggested he might have had a hand in leaking the documents.

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