Terror

The war in Korea has heightened political tension in Indo-China. The people, worried by Mao Tse-tung's Chinese Communist armies on their northern frontier, at first reacted to the invasion of South Korea with: "It might have been us." The swift and determined U.S. stand had brought them much encouragement, but later U.S. defeats brought doubt and fear again. Andre Laguerre, head of TIME'S Paris bureau, arrived in Saigon last fortnight, as Indo-China was caught in the grip of the wet monsoon, which had temporarily limited the scale of the civil war. Last week Laguerre cabled:

THE teeming streets of Saigon are magically emptied by the abrupt rain squalls. At one minute the Rue Catinat,* the city's main street, is 'busy as usual. Stores named in French and Annamite peddle silks and souvenirs, white-topped Vietnamese police amble along, Foreign Legionnaires crowd sidewalk cafes, civilians in shorts sip cafe au lait in front of the fashionable bar of La Pagode. Women, slim and petite, add color with their cai-at (a vivid silk gown split at the hips, worn over silk pajamas).

The next minute, without warning, the rain may be hurtling down, leaving no one in the streets except the cycle-drivers. Wearing only hats, shorts and wooden sandals, they seem not to mind the drenching as they push their armchair rickshas with their bicycles.

New Directions. Since the war in Korea, the people in the street and across Indo-China have been getting a new kind of treatment from the Communists. The party's propaganda, once heavily camouflaged with nationalism, is now based on the most blatant Stalinism. French intelligence recently reported from the mountains of northern Tonkin, where 40,000 armed Reds are hiding, that the Communists are holding anti-Soviet nationalists more by force and fear, less by ideology and persuasion.

On the Viet Nam side, Bao Dai's timid government has put some muscle into its administration. This week two strong men with contrasting backgrounds--one has worked with the Communists, the other always against them--were filling new jobs. But both brought the same message: the Communists, they said, were very tough people, and to beat them one had to be tougher still.

Nguyen Duy Thanh, 41, has grey hair, soft brown eyes and a deceptively mild manner. He has been with Communist Boss Ho Chi Minh since 1945. In 1941 he was appointed general commanding Ho's Vietminh engineers, and from 1948 until two months ago was Ho's minister of industrial production. Said Nguyen Duy Thanh last week:

"I decided to escape when the U.S. recognized Bao Dai. You don't realize how important that was for us. I have always been a nationalist, never a Communist. Until the Americans recognized the Emperor, I was not convinced that Viet Nam was really going to be independent. Many others would like to escape. But even important functionaries may not travel without a special permit. Only my ministerial rank allowed me to make a wide tour of inspection in northern Tonkin. I managed to get to the village where I was born, hid out there, and surrendered when a French patrol came along.

"Communist propaganda sneers at Bao Dai's phantom government, but nothing could be more phantomlike than Ho Chi Minh's cabinet. When we were not in session, no two cabinet ministers were allowed to be within 30 miles of each other. Cabinet meetings were held once a month, in different places in the mountains. It was quite usual for a minister to bicycle 60 miles to a meeting.

"Ho Chi Minh presides over the meetings. He used to arrive last, no one knew from where, preceded by secret police and accompanied by a small bodyguard. Cabinet meetings always opened in the same way. First we saluted the Vietminh* flag and observed a minute's silence for our dead. Then he would analyze the international situation."

"Objectively?" I asked.

"Unobjectively."

Old Father Ho. "Ho has simple manners and is an amusing man. I suppose he imitates Stalin. He likes to be 'Old Father Ho' to the people and 'Uncle Ho' to the children. This offsets some of the harm the Communists have done themselves by overthrowing the cult of respect to our ancestors which we Tonkinese have inherited from Confucius. Sometimes Ho recites verse. Sometimes he cracks a joke. I remember once--in Annamite we use the same word for 'cholera' as for 'left'--we had an outbreak of cholera, and he told the minister of health: 'You had better get this under control or people will think we are favoring the left.'

"Ho is a big man in the Communist world now. Back of him is a seven-man Politburo, which stays in the shadows. I don't know who belongs to it. Ho has been in China this year, in February, I think; he is not asking Mao for men, but for arms. He has plenty of men. All males between 18 and 45 have been conscripted, but he has arms for a few only.

"The Vietminh has grown hungry since the French occupied the rice fields of the Red River Delta a year ago. Rice in the mountains fetches 50 piastres ($2.50) a pound, and the black-market price of the Viet Nam piastre has gone up from 12 to 30 Vietminh piastres. I know Ho has sent some of his troops into China for short stays, so they could eat better.

"Now the Viet Nam government is sending me with a mission to India. My job will be to tell Nehru that the Vietminh is not nationalist, although there are many nationalists held by force in it, but Communist, and would enslave our people. Many people in the world are not yet experienced in the evil of Communism. They don't understand that Communism has two faces, an attractive one and a sad one, but the sad one is the true face."

A Sign of Weakness. IndoChina's other strong man is the Doc Phu Tam,* a wizened little man who is head of the Suretee Nationale, the political police. Tam's job is to combat the Communist terrorism which now stalks Indo-China. In the first six months of 1950, 14 Europeans, 17 foreign Asians (mostly Chinese) and 362 Indo-Chinese have been assassinated by Communist agents in Indo-China. Said the Doc Phu Tam:

"The main thing to remember about terrorism is that it is essentially a sign of weakness. The Vietminh has been retreating, and it tries to make up for its military humiliation by impressing the population with spectacular political murders. Grenades are thrown from cars or cycles. Usually we find they are not thrown by fanatics, but by youths who have been given 20 piastres, are bullied into signing oaths of allegiance to the Vietminh, then are ordered to throw a grenade under pain of death.

"Terrorism can only be combated by a police force which has a big network of informers and which is feared. That's the way I work, and I have been getting results. Last week, on information received, we raided the house of a Saigon architect and arrested 40 ringleaders, including the chief of the terrorist movement here.

"We picked up a kid the other day, a sergeant in the Vietminh army. I interrogated him, asked him what he was doing here. He said he had been ordered to Saigon, he didn't know why. After a little more interrogation he admitted he had been sent here to murder someone. I asked him whom he was to murder. He replied he hadn't yet been told. I interrogated him some more, and he admitted he had been sent to murder the Doc Phu Tam. I asked him if he knew who the Doc Phu Tam was, and he said no, his victim hadn't yet been pointed out to him. After further interrogation, he admitted he knew I was the Doc Phu Tam. I asked him what he had against me. After interrogation, he said he had been told he would either have to kill me or be put to death himself. You see, these poor kids aren't fanatics, they are terrorized themselves by a few bosses."

The Doc Phu Tam is one of the few Viet Nam officials who are clear about their basic political premises. He said:

"I know we can't do without the French yet. Independence is a very fine thing, and of course we want it, but what the people pray for now is peace and order. And when you want peace, and the Communists don't, you have to be hard."

Little Grey Blobs. I left the Doc Phu Tam and walked down the Rue Catinat, meditating on the old problem of how far democratic governments can go in fighting fire with fire. I was only dimly aware of a car that came screeching out of a side street. A brown arm shot out of the window, and I saw little grey blobs flying through the air. I dived for the gutter.

Six grenades were thrown. Some damage was done to store fronts. A dozen people were injured. No one was killed, but a police commissioner, sitting with his wife on the terrace of La Pagode, got a piece of grenade near his heart, and is still between life & death in Saigon Hospital.

Three of the grenades failed to explode. One of them rolled under a wicker chair in front of the Continental, barely five feet from where I was lying. I got up. There was some screaming, but already people were going about their business. A rain squall would have driven them off the street more quickly. I looked resentfully at my broken wristwatch.

At that moment I was in heartfelt agreement with the messages of Nguyen Duy Thanh and the Doc Phu Tam. If either had offered me a grenade, I would cheerfully have thrown it at Ho Chi Minh.

*Named for Marshal Nicolas de Catinat (1637-1712), one of Louis XIV's ablest generals. Defeating Victor Amadeus, Duke of Savoy, in the battles of Staffarda (1690) and Marsaglia (1693), Catinat occupied Savoy and part of Piedmont. He was popular with his troops, who nicknamed him, on account of his imperturbable calm and reasonableness, Le Pere La Pensee (Father Thought). *VietNam (Southern Land) is made up of Cochin China, Annam and Tonkin in French Indo-China. Vietminh was the name given to the coalition of various Indo-Chinese political parties and groups now dominated by the Communist Party. *The Doc Phu is a title originally bestowed by the imperial court of Annam, indicating one grade in the mandarin class. Today it is borne by upper-level civil servants.

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