Covering a Coup: Malcolm W. Browne in Saigon

The first sign of trouble came on a clear Friday afternoon, November 1, 1963. Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital, had been “empty and silent” for the traditional noon siesta when Malcolm W. Browne, Associated Press bureau chief, received a tip from a source at the U.S. Embassy. He learned that rebellious Army of the Republic of Vietnam troops had surrounded the central police station and the country’s naval headquarters on the riverfront was also under siege.

 
Browne drove his office’s Land Rover at “breakneck speed” to the navy compound. He ignored the base’s security guard, traveling past him for a half block until he heard yelling and the unmistakable sound of someone “chambering a round in his carbine.”
 

Uncertainty reigned, however, until 3:00 p.m., when Browne and his staff heard planes roaring over their office. With the AP office located only a short distance from the Gia Long Palace, the official residence for President Ngo Dinh Diem, “the combined sound of the strafing and heavy antiaircraft guns was shattering,” Browne remembered. An incoming shell came close to hitting the journalist as he tried to get a better view of the action, but a guard loyal to Diem saved Browne’s life by pulling him through a hole in a wall to safety.
 
Edwin Q. White, who had come from AP’s Tokyo bureau to bolster the staff, dispatched the first bulletin describing the heavy gunfire at the presidential palace and reports about ARVN troops in full battle gear deployed throughout the city. In his article, delivered out of the country with the assistance of the American and South Korean embassies, White predicted that the firing could well signal the start of a military coup against Diem’s government. “Marines in battle dress with heavy weapons and artillery surrounded national police director headquarters about 1350 [1:50 p.m.],” he wrote. “Other police headquarters throughout city were taken over by marines, apparently without resistance.”
 
As White remained at the office, Browne, Roy Essoyan (from AP’s Hong Kong bureau), and Bill Ha Van Tran set out to discover what was happening. “We did a lot of walking, running and crawling, machinegun fire and shrapnel snapping just overhead,” Browne recalled. “There was action everywhere, and no telling where the fire was going to come from next.”
 
The gunfire grew more intense as the sun set. Browne and his colleagues were able to identify where the hotspots were and which units “were clearly on the offensive against government troops and which ones were trying to counter-attack. So, it was pretty confusing. The whole city was divided up into a patchwork of different loyalties and different uniforms and plenty of shooting.”
 
The AP bureau’s “indefatigable” messenger, Dan Van Huan, sidestepped numerous firefights, said Browne, risking his life to keep messages flowing to White at the AP office. “We all think it will be nice to get back to the relative peace and safety of the normal war operations against the Vietcong,” joked Browne.

Rumors, plots, and heralds from above absorbed the attention of Saigon residents in the days leading up to the coup and even afterward. Conspirators seemed to be everywhere, scheming away in each other’s homes, in nightclubs, and in the countryside. “Everybody knew that something was coming,” Browne recalled.
 
Browne even wrote an article, sent over the AP wires, about a rumor that the Vietnamese expected the sun to start revolving strangely in the sky. Large crowds of office workers, shoppers, and strollers jammed into the city’s central markets, only to be scattered by the police. He reported that the sun’s abnormal motion was supposed to be the sign of a Buddhist miracle. Officials were suspicious about the rumor, believing it had been spread “as a test, to see how fast crowds could be assembled at key places in the city,” he added.
 
When mutinous ARVN units finally struck on November 1, plots and counterplots continued rose and fell. Rebel officers sometimes lied to their men about the true purpose of their movement into the capital. A colonel admitted to newsman Stanley Karnow of the Saturday Evening Post that he told his platoon leaders the police “were plotting to overthrow Diem and we were going to save him.” A mystified paratrooper asked his commander who they were supposed to fight and received the answer: “Anyone who opposes us is the enemy.”
 

Confusion also marked attempts by rebel forces to convince government supporters to join their cause. Browne uncovered the story of Captain Ho Tan Quyen, Diem’s naval commander, whose schedule that day was supposed to include an official dinner commemorating his birthday. Early Friday Quyen had been summoned to report to general staff headquarters by Major General Duong Van Minh, one of the key coup leaders. “Quyen drove to the headquarters near Saigon airport, where he undoubtedly met military commanders who were to lead the successful coup later in the day,” Browne reported.
 
Declining to join the rebellion, Quyen sped from the scene in his car toward Bien Hoa, hoping to rally loyalist forces. “Several jeeps and a civilian car were seen following Quyen outside the city,” wrote Browne. “The pursuit continued for eight miles outside city limits, and ended when a burst of submachine gun fire riddled Quyen’s vehicle. His body was laid out in the road and then taken away in a civilian car.”
 
That afternoon Quyen’s staff learned of his death from a revolutionary naval officer, who called upon his colleagues to surrender. Fighter aircraft attacked ships docked nearby, and the craft responded by blazing away at the airplanes with their deck guns, downing one plane, Browne reported. “But about 15 minutes later,” he added, “the naval command staff agreed to give in, and signed a document pledging loyalty to the revolutionaries.”
 

As Browne rallied his AP staff to cover the coup, two of his top men, reporter Peter Arnett and photographer Horst Faas, both away from Saigon, did all they could to get to the capital. Returning to South Vietnam after a trip to Cambodia on an Air Vietnam passenger jet, Arnett recalled that the plane had flown into Vietnamese airspace at 3:00 p.m. when he felt it starting to veer away from its destination. “I banged on the pilot’s cabin door and my fears were confirmed by the captain, who was talking with an air traffic controller; a coup d’etat was in progress; bombers were in the air over Saigon, blasting the Presidential Palace,” Arnett remembered. “I would miss the biggest story of my life because Tan Son Nhut Airport was closed to all traffic.”
 
Thinking fast, Arnett argued with the pilot, pointing out that the aircraft “had a right to land on its own soil” and raising terrible fears about the fate of the crew’s families amid the chaos. Arnett’s arguments worked, and the plane’s captain guided his craft to a safe landing.
 
An airline bus took Arnett most of the way to the AP office before its driver lost his nerve and made his passenger disembark. “Gunfire roared and ricocheted around me,” Arnett recalled. “I could see soldiers firing from upper-story windows at the Gia Long Palace. Our three-story office and apartment building had been turned into a fort with soldiers firing their weapons at the palace across the street, protecting themselves behind makeshift sandbagged emplacements in the parking lot and the first-floor balcony outside my apartment door.”
 
Bursting into the AP office, Arnett saw White, known by his colleagues as “unflappable Ed,” calmly puffing away on a cigar while typing; the rest of the staff had left. “The others are at the Caravelle [Hotel] and I’m holding the fort, which is something I’ve said plenty of times in the past but for once is true,” White told Arnett, who took advantage of a lull in the fighting to make his way to the Caravelle.
 
White remained at his post until 6:30 p.m. when, as Browne noted, “he decided things were getting a little too hot.” Later that night, a shell hit an M48 tank parked in front of the AP’s office, igniting the tank’s ammunition and causing it to burn throughout the night.
 
When he arrived at the Caravelle, Arnett discovered Browne and Essoyan on the hotel’s upper floors, where they had a spectacular view of the fighting going on at Gia Long and the barracks housing its guards. “The rumors and the speculation of months past were coming true before my eyes and I watched it all with a glass of Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other,” Arnett remembered.
 
As it grew dark, Browne saw tracers and shells streak through Saigon’s skies, with many hitting the palace, while others fell short, bringing down power and telephone lines. Leaving the hotel as the battle continued to rage, Arnett came upon children running around collecting spent cartridges from the sidewalks, two U.S. soldiers who stopped him to ask directions to the nearest bar, and two drunk Americans walking near the National Assembly building, one of them loudly complaining, “Tell them to knock that off, they’re scaring everybody.”
 
Walking to the Rex Hotel, which housed American troops, Arnett found its officers mess crowded with soldiers, who had been warned by authorities to stay off the streets. “They were whiling away the time rolling dice or playing the slot machines,” he noted. Later, on a suggestion from Browne, Arnett made his way to the U.S. military mission, where he stayed for the rest of evening. He even received a briefing about the coup from an American intelligence officer, “a rare display of generosity toward the media,” Arnett recalled. The official had been impressed by what he had seen from the anti-Diem forces, telling Arnett that it showed that the Vietnamese could “run a pretty good war if political considerations are removed.”
 
While Browne and Arnett tried to stay safe in the embattled city, Faas was in Ca Mau, on a patrol with South Vietnamese Rangers. A U.S. adviser accompanying the Rangers heard a report on his radio telling him to prepare to pull his forces from the field, as a coup had broken out. “Oh shit,” Faas remembered saying, “I’m two hundred miles away from Saigon and that’s the story that’s developing and I’m down here in Ca Mau. Get me out of here as quickly as possible.”
 
Faas hooked up with Steve Stibbens, a Marine photographer for Stars and Stripes, and they were able to get tickets for a flight to Saigon. Unable to land there because of the fighting, the plane diverted its flight to the port city of Vung Tao, located about sixty miles southeast of Saigon. Faas and Stibbens commandeered a jeep from the Vietnamese and drove as fast as possible to the capital, getting there after the newly established 7:00 p.m. curfew.
 
Dressed as he was, in a helmet and makeshift uniform, Faas discovered he had little trouble passing through roadblocks or driving around rebel units scattered throughout the city. Finding the AP office empty, he remembered feeling guilty about being late for such a momentous story.
 
Shortly after midnight, Saigon “became still and dead as a city under the plague,” Browne reported. Downtown streets seemed deserted, and the guns fell silent. The lull allowed a dinner-jacketed headwaiter at a leading hotel, White wrote, to calmly seat a few guests, laughingly explaining to them that “service might be [a] little slow because some restaurant help had left.” A dog’s loud barking betrayed “stealthy movement in the shadows,” Browne observed. “No lights showed from inside the waiting palace.”
 
At about 3:00 a.m., intense gunfire broke out, with large shells from distant artillery hitting a building behind the telecommunications center. Browne could also see tanks moving through the streets, slipping “across the main boulevards from the west and from the riverfront, taking up positions just outside the palace walls.”
 
The final assault on the palace began at 4:00 a.m. “The blast of cannon, machineguns and rapid-fire pieces blended into a continuous roar,” he reported. “The dark shapes in the streets spat clouds of green, yellow and blue fire, and great blobs of red flame marked the exploding shells. Buildings near the palace became infernos, and answering fire from the palace set two armored vehicles afire.”
 

Finally, at 6:37 a.m., Browne recorded, the drained, grimy palace guards surrendered, hoisting a white flag, which was greeted with “a thunderous cheer” by the rebel forces. Faas followed as Vietnamese marines stormed into the palace, smashing chandeliers, tearing down Diem’s portraits, and firing their weapons, though there was no need to do so as the opposition had collapsed. By 9:00 a.m. Faas decided he had taken enough photographs and turned his attention to finding a place to develop his film.
 
With the AP office’s darkroom out of action (the power and telephone lines were out), Faas went to a local photo shop, scaring the store’s staff when he burst through the front door in his makeshift uniform. He used the store’s equipment to develop approximately twelve photographs. With the photos in hand, he walked to the Post, Telegraph and Telephone office to transmit his work with the assistance of an employee he knew, Madame Binh.
 
Talking to Binh, Faas learned that he was the first photographer to arrive, beating his colleagues. “They had mistakenly believed that the post office, because it was occupied by troops, had been closed; it hadn’t been closed. The troops went through it,” he recalled. “The coup troops made a few propaganda broadcasts, occupied it with their people, but the personnel continued as normal.” By 4:00 p.m. a line opened and Faas was able to send his photographs to the outside world. “I happened to be a hero when I thought I would be almost fired,” he remembered.