The initial two-year contract commenced when the first contingent of professors and staff arrived in Saigon on May 20, 1955. They found a city embroiled in a dissident uprising by
Bình Xuyên forces, with shelling and street fighting that threatened not only
Diệm's official residence but also the hotel in which MSUG personnel were temporarily housed. At the height of the disturbances, hotel rooms were ransacked and looted, and some professors lost all of their possessions. MSUG's intended academic programs were put on hold, and their focus quickly turned toward improving regional government administration and police services.
Commissariat of Refugees Of immediate concern to Diệm was the social upheaval caused by some 900,000 people fleeing the communist North during the 300-day "free movement" period set by the
1954 Geneva Accords. The massive influx required both resettlement and infrastructure-building services, which were provided by the government agency known as COMIGAL (Commissariat of Refugees; the acronym is from its French name). MSUG consulted for COMIGAL to such an extent during the first months of the program that other pursuits fell by the wayside. One of MSUG's proposals with positive results was the idea of decentralized bureaucracy for COMIGAL. By scattering small offices throughout the villages, COMIGAL was able to improve the responsiveness of those offices. Funding for infrastructure projects was generally approved by Saigon in less than two weeks, and the offices could work directly with local leaders, who thus felt that their input and participation were important. On the other hand, MSUG was unable to convince Diệm of the validity of the land claims made by the
Montagnards, indigenous tribesmen in Vietnam's
Central Highlands. Thousands of refugees, with government approval and encouragement, became permanent squatters on land "already cleared by highlanders for planting." Part of Diệm's intent was to create a "human wall" of sympathetic, mostly Catholic settlers against communist infiltration from North Vietnam and nearby Cambodia. However, both the
Montagnards and the majority Buddhists resented being governed by a Catholic regime, a minority religious group that they saw as unabashed remnants of the colonial era. The opposition and Diệm's ruthless suppression pushed these groups toward further insurgency and ultimately communist rule.
National Institute of Administration Even as its time was monopolized by refugee assistance, the MSU Group pursued a portion of its academic goals. As the "public administration" facet of its contract, MSUG designed, financed, and implemented an expansion of the National Institute of Administration (NIA), a civil servant training school. NIA had started out as a two-year training school in the resort city of
Da Lat in January 1953. Under MSUG recommendation, the school was moved to Saigon and gradually extended into a four-year program. Along with its assistance in developing the new Saigon campus and teaching classes, MSUG was instrumental in a substantial expansion of the NIA library, which, by 1962, held more than 22,000 books and other documents. The library was considered one of MSUG's greatest successes, and the NIA affiliation was the longest-lasting of the MSUG projects. However, the library's usefulness suffered from the simple fact that most of its documents were in English, rather than Vietnamese or French, and by the end of the MSUG contract, the library was threatened by restricted accessibility, poor maintenance, and a lack of qualified Vietnamese personnel to staff it.
Police administration The most influential and ultimately controversial aspect of MSUG technical assistance was in the field of police administration. The group supplied not only consulting and training services but also material aid. In general, MSUG was responsible for distributing US aid, provided through USOM, until 1959, when USOM established its own police staff. MSUG staff acted as consultants to determine the needs of the police groups and then made the procurements themselves. The matériel included "revolvers, riot guns, ammunition, tear gas, jeeps and other vehicles, handcuffs, office equipment, traffic lights, and communications equipment." MSUG then trained Vietnamese personnel to use and maintain the equipment. In general, MSUG trained instructors, who could then teach others; direct instruction, except in special cases like revolver training for the presidential guard, "was done only as a temporary expedient." The police administration project was largely successful since the training was based in hands-on demonstration and so was much more immediate and tangible. Also, the MSUG-taught Vietnamese instructors rapidly assumed training themselves. At the same time, classroom sessions in the principles of police procedure and theory suffered from a number of problems that limited their success. Few MSUG professors spoke Vietnamese or French, leading to a translation delay and information loss. In addition, American-style lectures were a source of dissonance for the students, raised on the French juridical system. (That was also an issue in NIA classes taught by MSUG staff.) Police administration consultation and training were most effective with the Sûreté, Vietnam's national law enforcement agency, in part because most of equipment was delivered to the agency. By the same token, municipal police departments, which received less equipment, were less affected. The greatest local improvement was in traffic control in Saigon. With regard to the civil guard, there was almost no effect. The civil guard was a 60,000-man paramilitary organization that MSUG hoped to reform into something resembling a US
state police outfit, an organization familiar to the professors. That would have entailed a primarily rural organization whose members would live in the communities they served. However, Saigon and the US
Military Assistance Advisory Group preferred the civil guard to be a more heavily armed paramilitary force, organized into regiments and living in garrisons, which could exercise national police duties and support the national army. As a result of the impasse, very little of the equipment that MSUG had planned for the civil guard was distributed until 1959, leaving the civil guard unprepared when major communist insurgency action began the same year.
Staffing issues One of MSUG's drawbacks was that in many cases, the university lacked the manpower to staff the project and continue its scheduled classes in
East Lansing. That was the case throughout MSUG, and the group was obliged to hire extensively outside the university to fulfill its contract with Vietnam, often giving the new staffers academic rank (generally assistant professor or lecturer). The staffing issue had perhaps its most significant ramifications in the police administration division. Although Michigan State's School of Police Administration and Public Safety was "internationally recognized during the cold war era," it lacked experience in the much-needed areas of counterespionage and counterinsurgency, and the department head, Arthur Brandstatter, hired new personnel accordingly. At the height of the police administration project, only 4 of its 33 advisors had been Michigan State employees prior to MSUG, and many had never even visited the East Lansing campus. As it turns out, several of these police advisors also worked for the
Central Intelligence Agency. They formed a separate group, establishing their own office apart from the rest of the police administration staff in MSUG's Saigon headquarters, "and were responsible only to the American Embassy in Saigon." The CIA members worked closely with a special security unit of the Sûreté between 1955 and 1959. Although they were nominally under the aegis of MSUG, the specifics of their activities remained unknown to MSUG throughout. (MSUG files "support [the] contention that the agents were not spies," but CIA records remain classified.) The existence of the CIA group was not hidden from MSUG staff; on the contrary, it was common knowledge to the professors, if not openly discussed. A 1965 overview of the project was quite matter-of-fact about it. When MSUG "compelled USOM to establish a public safety division of its own in July, 1959[,] USOM also absorbed at this time the CIA unit that had been operating within MSUG." That almost-parenthetical statement would later provide the impetus for a sensational exposé. ==Phase Two: 1957–59==