Page:Pentagon-Papers-Part IV. A. 5.djvu/156

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Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011


TOP SECRET – Sensitive

and 1958, and that by the end of 1959, they were becoming casualties at the rate of more than 2% per month. Through 1963, Fall calculated, 13,000 petty officials were eliminated by the VC. 145 The New York Times estimated that 3,000 local government officials were killed or captured during 1960146, and TIME magazine reported in the fall of 1960 that the GVN was losing 250 to 300 per month to a "new Communist offensive." The U.S. "White Paper" of 1961 cited losses of 1400 local officials and civilians during 1960.148 But if there was disparity among numerical estimates, most reports, public or private, concluded that the violence was real, anti-government, rising in intensity, and increasingly organized.

In mid-1958 Bernard Fall correlated the locus of rural violence reported in South Vietnam with complaints lodged with the ICC in Hanoi by the DRV on behalf of "Former Resistance members," alleging GVN violations of the "no reprisals" provisions of the Geneva Accords (Armistice, Article 14c). The detail in these complaints indicated an intelligence apparatus in South Vietnam.

COMMUNIST COMPLAINTS July 1954.July 1957 under Art.14c of

the Geneva Cease-Fire Alleged Violations ~ REBEL ACTIVITIES Assassinations Raids or Ambush ~ 6 Cells or Units

"The conclusion is inescapable," he wrote, that there must be some coordination between the rebels and the North Vietnamese Government."149 About that same time, U.S. intelligence reported that Viet Cong-bandit operations north of Saigon seemed to be part of a calculated campaign of economic sabotage.150 Also, reports began to come in of a new "Front" operating in the countryside. Anthropologist Gerald Hickey wrote of

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