His advisers saw Bao as the problem. After ten years of intense U.S training, his much larger army had been repeatedly humiliated, culminating in a disastrous encounter at the village of Ap Bac that killed nine Americans. Bao’s army then worsened the crisis by firing into a crowd of protesters who were defying a government ban on civil demonstrations. With the tacit approval of the White House, frustrated generals under the Defense Minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, saw their chance and plotted to overthrow the monarchy. On November 1, 1963, Diem and his generals seized Saigon and sent the imperial family packing into an American exile. The administration’s silence was correctly interpreted as satisfaction with the direction of events. Confidence in Diem was further improved when the CIA-backed Colonel Phoumi succeeded in deposing the Pathet Laos and seized control of the Laotian government. Back in Washington, the apparent success in Laos was read as an endorsement of Dien’s competence, though the victory in Laos was to prove ephemeral. Kennedy’s new defense secretary, Robert McNamara, went so far as to declare in December that “we have every reason to believe the [U.S military] plans will be successful in 1964.” By late 1964, however, the South Vietnamese government and army were falling apart, while Americans were being killed by terrorists in Saigon.