Most Americans consider that our involvement in the Vietnamese War began with the Tonkin Gulf incident. The fact is our involvement began almost immediately following the 1954 Geneva Peace Accords that divided the country at the 17th parallel. The Pentagon Papers leaked some information, but the whole story of this operation is only now becoming known. Immediately following the Accords, CIA Director Allen Dulles sent Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale to Vietnam as Deputy Director of the Office of Special Operation with orders to implement clandestine operations against the North. Highly experienced in such operations, in the 1950’s Lansdale performed similar duties for President Magasasay eliminating the Philippines of Huk Communists.
Lansdale recruited and trained Vietnamese civilians to carry out the initial counterinsurgency operations against North Vietnam. Lansdale relied on a variety of ethnic Vietnamese crews to accomplish this mission including Nung and other minorities that came from areas close to the Chinese border. For security reasons, Lansdale used Saipan as a training center. Later, the CIA borrowed trained counterinsurgency operatives from Taiwan for commando raids into North Vietnam. Early operations used native junks since they blended into the fishing boats off the North Vietnamese waters. These operations continued over the years, some highly successful while others were less so resulting in the complete loss of some crews. The code name for these operations was Nautilus after the mysterious submarine from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Missions consisted of inserting spies recruited by the CIA and commando raids conducted by Republic of Vietnam frogmen. As the NVN Navy improved intelligence gathering capabilities, the routes used by Nautilus missions became well known and the junks soon lost their advantage of blending in. The NVN simply waited for the junks to cross the 17th parallel. The junk’s slow speed and weak firepower became too much of a disadvantage against North Vietnam’s heavily armed Swatow and P-4 gunboats.
