Word: saigon
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Mustered out as a major, Colby earned a law degree from Columbia. He practiced law in New York until the Korean War, when he joined the successor organization to the OSS, the CIA. After serving in Stockholm and Rome, he was named CIA station chief in Saigon in 1959. Three years later he became chief of the CIA's Far East division in Washington. He returned to Saigon in 1968 to take charge of the pacification effort, which included the notorious Phoenix program. By 1971, Phoenix had caused the deaths of 20,587 Viet Cong members and sympathizers, according...
...President Nguyen Van Thieu. Since the 1973 Peace Accords were signed in Paris, the opposing sides in South Viet Nam have methodically killed each other at a doleful rate of 4,000 a month. What makes the fighting utterly futile is the fact that neither the Communists nor the Saigon government has scored any strategic gains. Moreover, public discontent with Thieu's tautly run regime has been fueled by inflation, which is currently running at a staggering 70% a year. As a result, Thieu, for the first time since the ceasefire, now faces a disparate but potentially volatile opposition...
Next a group of editors and publishers met in Saigon to protest the press code that has long muzzled South Vietnamese newspapers and magazines. After a long series of unproductive meetings with Information Minister Nha, the editors announced that they would henceforth ignore government restrictions. When three Saigon newspapers published the full text of the Catholic priests' charges against Thieu and his family, about 60 Catholics, Buddhists and journalists marched to prevent police from entering the printing plants. One newspaper proprietor burned 10,000 copies of an edition the police had ordered confiscated while a crowd shouted, "Down with...
Although Buddhist immolations in 1963 roused American opinion against Ngo Dinh Diem and in 1966 forced Thieu to promise elections, until recently the Buddhists had limited their anti-Thieu protests to pathetic little marches in downtown Saigon, in which they were outnumbered 10 to 1 by police. They have now formed an organization called the Forces for National Reconciliation. The Buddhists carefully refrained from labeling the "force" a political party in order to avoid legal harassment, but they clearly intend to exert renewed political influence. Says Senator Vu Van Mau, leader of a Buddhist group in the Thieu-dominated Senate...
...Congress and American opinion. The Pentagon had originally asked for $1.6 billion in military aid, which South Viet Nam desperately needed, but Congress has tentatively trimmed aid for the next fiscal year to $700 million. The Administration had hoped to get $750 million from Congress to shore up Saigon's sagging economy, but Capitol Hill seems more likely to settle for a modest $400 million. For Nguyen Van Thieu, it is money that counts...