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ABSTRACT
The British maintained a consulate in Hanoi throughout the Vietnam War, even though neither government officially recognised the other. Although these representatives were extremely restricted in their movements, they managed to remain remarkably well informed about the capital, the country, and the impact of the war. This article examines the valedictory despatches of three of the last consuls, who gave their final impressions of their post in the waning days of the conflict. The first diplomat, Daphne Park, wrote hers in 1970, when the war was still raging. The second despatch, by T.J. Everard, dates from 1973, year of the Paris Peace Accords that ended U.S. participation in the conflict. The third, from J.H. Fawcett, was sent in January 1975 as the complete defeat of South Vietnam neared. Each one provides a fascinating insight into a country, a war, and a period of great upheaval. They each reflect on, in very different ways at very different points, the evolution of the North Vietnamese people and their slow and uneven departure from war as they seek to rebuild the nation. They also illustrate the slow progression of the British consulate in Hanoi from MI6 outpost to a more conventional embassy status.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Parris and Bryson, Parting Shot.
2. It should be noted that I was unable to find any other valedictory despatches from this period. It seems likely that, since the posting was only for one year and none of them held the rank of ambassador, a number of consuls chose not to write them or, possibly, they are missing from the archives.
3. Daphne Park’s valedictory despatch, dated October 25, 1970 and entitled ‘Her Majesty’s Representative in Limbo: A Valedictory’, can be found at the National Archives, Kew, TNA FCO 160/118.
4. His valedictory despatch, dated November 26, 1973, can be found at TNA, FCO 15/1828.
5. His valedictory despatch, dated January 6, 1975, can be found at TNA, FCO 15/2125.
6. For more on this, see Kear, ‘British Consulate-General Hanoi’; Smith, Origins of Vietnam War, chapter 3, and Wolf, ‘This Secret Town’.
7. Material on the Haiphong consulate can be found at TNA, FO 371/117214, 117223, 117242, and 186,408 and FO 959/141. The British, unlike the French, voluntarily chose to close their Haiphong office. For more on this see Maguire, ‘Le consulat français’.
8. While there has been some work on Hong Kong in the Cold War and even an article on the colony as a holiday location for American servicemen in the Vietnam War (Hamilton, ‘“Haven for Tortured Souls”’), relations with the DRV have been generally neglected. There are a number of documents relating to it, though, in the Foreign Office papers.
9. Hayes, Queen of Spies, location 5016–5022.
10. In 1958, the DRV asked to establish a press office in London. The British agreed primarily because ‘Failure to do so might cause the North Vietnamese to retaliate by cutting off essential facilities from the British Consulate in Hanoi […] The Consulate already lead a precarious existence and are wholly dependent on the goodwill of the North Vietnamese’, 31/1/58, N° DV1621/1, Memorandum by F.S. Tomlinson, TNA, FO371/136161.
11. A fair amount has been written about Wilson and the Vietnam War. See, for example, Colman, ‘A “Special Relationship”?’; Ellis, Britain the United States and the Vietnam War; Vickers, ‘Harold Wilson, the British Labour Party, and the War in Vietnam’; Ellis, ‘Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson and the Vietnam War’; Young, ‘The Wilson Government and the Davies Peace Mission to North Vietnam, July 1965’; and Hughes, ‘A “missed opportunity” for peace?’.
12. A great deal has been published on American intelligence operations in Vietnam and there are too many to cite here. For a fairly recent overview, see Warner, ‘US Intelligence and Vietnam’ and Ochiai, US Intelligence and Vietnam War.
13. 25/7/59, N° DV 1692/1, British Embassy Saigon to South East Asia Department, TNA, FO371/144453.
14. Asselin, Vietnam’s American War, 213.
15. In footnote 7 to chapter 22, Hayes gives a list of SIS station chiefs in Hanoi from 1957. It does, however, seem to be incomplete, especially for the earlier period, location 7419–7424.
16. At least none that I have been able to find. Neither figure on the list Paddy Hayes gives of SIS station chiefs in Hanoi previously cited. There is a tenuous link with Fawcett since his father, Commander Harold Fawcett, RN, did intelligence work during World War II, notably with regard to anti-submarine warfare.
17. Hayes, Queen of Spies, location 1857.
18. For more on women in the Foreign Office, see Helen McCarthy, ‘Petticoat Diplomacy’. Claire Sanderson in Perfide Albion? and Emilie Berthillot, in chapter four of Les espions de Sa Majesté have sections on the history of women. also discuss the question. While there have been a number of histories of women in American intelligence or during World War II, there has been relatively little done on female UK spies during the Cold War. The gender imbalance and lack of promotion for women continues to be a problem as the 2015 report ‘Women in the UK Intelligence Community’ shows.
19. Busch, All the Way?, 226
20. I have not been able to get to the Nixon library or examine the (extremely voluminous) archives of the Saigon embassy in the US archives. I have been to the Johnson archives where I found the British despatches among the papers read by the administration and commented on—but that was before the period of these consuls. The State Department generally received the despatches from the British Embassy in Washington and from the American Embassy in Saigon (which got them from the British Embassy in Saigon), although they were occasionally edited if there was something the British did not want the Americans to know. I would like to thank the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library for awarding me the Moody Research Grant that allowed me to undertake research there.
21. Asselin, Vietnam’s American War, 221
22. 22 April 1971, John Kerry, testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3875422 (Consulted 20 February 2020). The RAND study for 1964 noted that the fighters they interviewed who had fought against the French earlier ‘see themselves as Vietnamese patriots who joined a widespread popular nationalist movement to expel the colonialist rulers and win independence for Vietnam’. Donnell, Pauker and Zasloff, “Viet Cong Motivation,” 11.
23. Anderson, in his book Trapped by Success, 4, compares Vietnam after the war with France to the US after the American Revolution. There are many other examples and they often portray South Vietnam as a simple puppet state, denying its agency. Recently, a number of people have tried to counter this image of South Vietnam, such as Duy Lap Nguyen, who wrote in his book, The Unimagined Community, 11: ‘This study disputes the representation of the war as a contest between US imperialism and the indomitable will of the Vietnamese people, rooted in a national history of heroic anti-colonial struggle’.
24. Dunnigan and Nofi, Dirty Little Secrets, 36
25. Dommen, The Indochinese Experience, 261.
26. Along with Asselin of importance here is Lien-Hang T. Nguyen’s work, notably, Hanoi’s War which provides a great deal of detail on the North Vietnamese government and its leaders, especially Le Duan and Le Duc Tho. The works of Anh Cheng Guan and William Duiker are also key.
27. For more on the USSR’s role in North Vietnam, see Gaiduk.
28. Park observes in her valedictory despatch that one sign of how out of touch Eastern Bloc diplomats are from the North Vietnamese is that Vietnamese studies in these countries is ‘a subdivision of Chinese studies’ which obviously causes ‘a distorting mirror’ in their analyses and understanding.
29. The authors speak little about China and one has the impression they have little contact with Chinese diplomats—unlike with those of the Eastern bloc. Yet, China played a major role in North Vietnam, although less at this time than earlier. For more on this see Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars and Jian, ‘China’s Involvement in the Vietnam War’.
30. Truong Chinh was one of the most important of all North Vietnamese—and later Vietnamese leaders. From 1941 to 1956 he was General Secretary of the Communist Party but was demoted after the failure of land reform. He gradually returned to power after that, becoming the top party leader again in 1986 until his death two years later.