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 "Delta Pacification Plan" and said he would like to see it executed without delay. 61/ Earlier, on 3 February, he had created "by presidential decree the Inter-Ministerial Committee for Strategic Hamlets (IMCSH), comprising the heads of various ministries (Defense, Interior, Education, Civic Action, Rural Affairs, etc.). 62/ The IMCSH was, as its membership indicates, a coordinating body designed to give national direction and guidance to the program. Its importance is not in its work -- for it apparently did very little -- but as an indicator of Diem's early 1962 thinking of strategic hamlets as a program and of the central role which his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, would play in this program.

Nhu was the real driving force behind GVN's uneven but discernible movement toward adoption of the strategic hamlet theme as a unifying concept in its pacification efforts. In the early period under discussion he masked his central role, however. He was not announced as the Chairman of the IMCSH (nobody was), but the committee was responsible to him. 63 / He did not, however, lead it actively. As two American observers remarked at the time, "Nhu seems to have consulted the committee seldom and to have shared his policy-making power with it even less frequently." 64/

C.

But although brother Nhu was behind the scenes in late 196I and early 1962, an occasional fleeting glimpse of his thinking and the direction in which he was heading has still managed to show through. A CIA report from Saigon summarized Nhu's instructions to a dozen province chiefs from the Delta in a meeting held on l4 December 1961. Primary emphasis was to be placed on the strategic hamlet program, Nhu said, and this program was to be coupled with a "social revolution" against "Viet-Nam's three enemies: divisive forces, low standard of living, and communism." 65/ The CIA Task Force - Vietnam observed, in forwarding this report, that Nhu's "social revolution and strategic hamlets appear to be fuzzy concepts with little value in the fight against the Communists." 66/

No doubt these concepts seemed fuzzy at the end of 1961. But within another twelve months, as events would prove, they would be widely recognized as the twin spearheads of GVN^s counterinsurgent effort, fuzzy or not. The strategic hamlet program would have broad support within the U.S. government and financial resources to underpin that support. The "social revolution" to which Nhu referred in December 1961 would be surfaced as Diem's "personalism" drive. The important thing for the present analysis is that all of the expectations of the several participant groups -- both U.S. and GVN -- were identifiable by very early 1962 at the latest, and that the concept of the strategic hamlet program in the broad sense had been fully adumbrated. The skeleton -- the rationale -- was complete; the body -- operational programs -- had not yet taken form. Each group could, however, work toward construction of a slightly different body (and for differing reasons) and claim with some plausibility to be working from the same skeleton. Rh