CIA Opens the Saigon Military Mission

June 1, 1954

1954-06_CIA_Opens_Saigon_Military_Mission

Overview

The CIA opens the covert Saigon Military Mission (SMM) under Colonel Edward G. Lansdale. The CIA tasks the SMM with subverting Ho Chi Minh’s Communist regime and strengthening the South. Until the end of 1956, the SMM helps train the Vietnamese National Army, advises the South’s government, and directs propaganda and paramilitary campaigns against the North.1

¹Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (2nd revised edition; New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 236–37; Thomas L. Ahern, Jr., Vietnam Declassified: The CIA and Counterinsurgency (Lexington, KY: Univeristy of Kentucky Press, 2010), 27–28; Tucker, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, 359, 631–32. See also Kevin J. Coy, “Colonel Edward Geary Lansdale and the Saigon Military Mission: The CIA in Vietnam, 1954–1955,” a paper presented at a 2002 symposium at Texas Tech University. See http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/2002_Symposium/2002Papers_files/coy.php (link is external) (accessed 4/9/14). Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941–1960, United States Army in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1985), 224–25.