_Post-Geneva South Vietnam_ The execution of the Geneva Agreement thrust that area of Vietnam south of the partition line into a period of profound confusion and instability. Even worse, the colonial period had done little to prepare the Cochinchinese and Annamese for the tremendous problems at hand. No real apparatus for central government existed. Likewise, the long colonial period left the area with few experienced political leaders capable of establishing and managing the required governmental machinery. Political control passed nominally to the French-sponsored emperor, Bao Dai, who was living in France at the time. For all practical purposes, leadership in the South devolved upon Bao Dai’s recently appointed pro-Western premier, Ngo Dinh Diem. The product of a prosperous and well-educated Catholic family from Hue, Diem had served the French briefly as a province chief prior to World War II. Always a strong nationalist but staunchly anti-Communist, he had been unable to reconcile his anti-French attitudes with the Viet Minh movement during the Indochina War. As a result Diem had left his homeland in the early 1950s to live at a Catholic seminary in the United States. There he remained until his appointment as premier in mid-June of 1954. The months immediately following the Geneva agreement found Ngo Dinh Diem struggling to create the necessary governmental machinery in Saigon, the capital of the southern zone. At best, however, his hold on the feeble institutions was tenuous. A serious confrontation was developing between the premier and the absent Bao Dai, still residing in France. Further complicating the political scene was the presence of Hoa Hao and Cao Dai armies in the provinces surrounding the capital, and the existence in Saigon of an underworld organization named the Binh Xuyen.[1-D] As 1955 opened the leaders of these three politically oriented factions were pressing demands for concessions from the new central government. Among these were permission to maintain their private armies, and the authority to exercise political control over large, heavily populated areas. [1-D] The Binh Xuyen originally operated from the swamps south of the Chinese-dominated Cholon district of Saigon. Controlling the vice and crime of the city, by 1954 they had gained control of the police under circumstances that reeked of bribery. A year later the organization was brutally crushed by Ngo Dinh Diem.