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This was accompanied by a “rumor campaign that the Vietminh were being sent into China as railroad laborers.”

Because this propaganda painted such a “scary picture” of life in the North, Lansdale claimed, “there was a really significant refusal to go North”47—not on the part of hardened Vietminh operatives, many of whom were ordered to remain behind in any case, but, rather, among the impressionable teenagers whom Hanoi hoped to lure north for insurgent training and subsequent infiltration back into the South.

He found that the reports originated with a rumor campaign that had been started by the South Vietnamese army’s G-5, at his suggestion, to create the impression that the Vietminh were tools of Chinese imperialists.

He recalled having an argument in 1954 with none other than Edward Lansdale “over a propaganda story” he had heard while visiting the North “about village children whose eardrums had been ruptured by the insertion of chopsticks during a Vietminh torture session.”

Some nine hundred thousand refugees moved south, roughly two-thirds of them Catholics, while only thirty thousand people—mostly Vietminh cadres—went north.