spartans_in_darkness

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HQ, "Big"Minh had convened a meeting of virtually
all of the ARVN's senior officers. When the
men had finally seated themselves, Minh stood
up and informed them of the coup's start.
Immediately, submachine-gun-toting military
police arrived and put the officers under house
arrest. Fighting broke out in several sections of
the city as rebel and loyalists troops clashed. At
first, Nhu thought that this was the beginning of
his planned countercoup, but soonrealized that
his supporters had changed sides. By that afternoon
he and Diem had fled the Presidential
Palace through a secret tunnel.
•
(TS//SI) By the end of 1 November, the fighting
was pretty much over. The major problem
remaining for the coup leaders was running down
the fugitives, Diem and Nhu, who were moving
from hideout to hideout in Cholon, the Chinese
section of Saigon.1
(TB//SI) SIGINT also provided a strange anticlimax
to the affair. In a report issued shortly
after the coup to the National Indications Center,
NSA noted that, besides the expected increase in
post-coup communications activity out of Hanoi,
it discovered something else quite curious: three
days before the coup, on 29 October, Hanoi had
sent a higher than normal volume of messages to
the COSVN located just across the border. in
Cambodia.'" The next day, COSVN, in turn,
transmitted an "unusually high volume of messages"
to its subordinates throughout South
Vietnam. Asimilar spike in message volume was
registered ort26 October, the original date of the
general's coup.NSA could not equate thei'two
peaks in the communist message levels with the
coup activity, but it noted that such a pattern
before the coup was "interesting." 194
('f'8//8Il1\ further NSA analysis of the communications
suggested that the.Viet Cong were
"undoubtedly aware thatacoup was in the making."
195 There certainly wereseveralreasonable
explanations to account for a possible-communist
EO 1.4. (c)
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