Johnson said he was not ready for this proposal since he did not have congress yet as a partner and trustee. But he did order the preparation of NSAM 288, which was based upon this proposal. It was essentially a target list of bombing sites that eventually reached 94 possibilities. By May 25, with Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater clamoring for bombing of the north, LBJ had made the decision that the U.S. would directly attack North Vietnam at an unpsecified point in the future.23 But it is important to note that even before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Johnson had ordered the drawing up of a congressional resolution. This had been finalized by William Bundy, McGeorge Bundy’s brother. Therefore, in June of 1964, Johnson began lobbying certain people for its passage in congress. On June 10, McNamara said, “that in the event of a dramatic event in Southeast Asia we would go promptly for a congressional resolution.”24 But William Bundy added, the actual decision to expand the war would not be made until after the election.25
And that is what happened. Johnson seized upon the hazy and controversial events in the Gulf of Tonkin during the first week of August to begin the air war planned in NSAM 288. Yet the Tonkin Gulf incident had been prepared by Johnson himself. After Kennedy’s death, President Johnson made a few alterations in the draft of NSAM 273. An order which Kennedy had never seen but was drafted by McGeorge Bundy after a meeting in Honolulu, a meeting which took place while Kennedy was visiting Texas. In the rough draft prepared by Bundy, it allowed for maritime operations against the North, but only by the government of South Vietnam.26 This was changed by Johnson. Realizing that, as written, this would take time—since South Vietnam had no Navy to speak of—he allowed these missions to be performed by American ships. This resulted in what was called OPLAN 34A. These were hit and run attacks done by small, fast patrol boats manned by South Vietnamese sailors. But all the support and preparations were done by Americans. This included American destroyers offshore of North Vietnam monitoring enemy action through electronic intelligence in order to collect data on where things like North Vietnamese radar installations and torpedo boat harbors were located. It was these patrols, codenamed DESOTO, that resulted in the American navy violating Vietnamese territorial waters. On August 2, the destroyer Maddox was attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Although torpedoes were launched, none hit. The total damage to the Maddox was one bullet through the hull. Both Johnson and the Defense Department misrepresented this incident to congress and the press. They said the North Vietnamese fired first, that the USA had no role in the patrol boat raids, that the ships were in international waters, and there was no hot pursuit by the Maddox. These were all wrong.27 Yet Johnson used this overblown reporting, plus a non-existent attack two nights later on the destroyer Turner Joy, to begin to push his war resolution through congress. He then took out the target list assembled for NSAM 288 and ordered air strikes that very day. After the air reprisals for the one bullet of damage to an American hull, the government of North Vietnam met. They decided that direct American military intervention in Vietnam was on its way. That a continuous air war was imminent and the public had to be made aware of this. The next month, they began sending the first North Vietnamese regulars down the Ho Chi Minh trail into South Vietnam.28 They were right about the continuous air war. For on August 7, Johnson sent a message to General Maxwell Taylor. He wanted a whole gamut of possible operations presented to him for direct American attacks against the North. The target date for the systematic air war was set for January 1965.29 This was called operation Rolling Thunder and it ended up being the largest bombing campaign in military history. The reader should note: the January target date was the month Johnson would be inaugurated after his re-election. As John Newman noted in his masterful book JFK and Vietnam, Kennedy was disguising his withdrawal plan around his re-election; Johnson was disguising his escalation plan around his re-election.
But there is today new evidence that makes Johnson look even worse on this issue. This new evidence more than suggests that not only did Johnson know he was breaking with Kennedy’s policy, but he tried to disguise that break. In a declassified phone call of February 20, 1964, Johnson told McNamara, “I always thought it was foolish for you to make any statements about withdrawing. I thought it was bad psychologically. But you and the president thought otherwise, and I just sat silent.”30 In other words, Johnson was aware of what Kennedy and McNamara were planning. He was opposed to it but suffered in silence. But that would now be changed with Johnson in charge. The policy split between Kennedy and Johnson depicted in this call clearly harks back to Johnson’s visit with Diem in 1961 and his cooperation with the Pentagon in trying to get Diem to request combat troops.
In another conversation, less than two weeks later, Johnson actually tries to make McNamara take back what he said in 1963 about the initial thousand man withdrawal and the complete withdrawal in 1965. He begins to formulate excuses to say that NSAM 263 didn’t really mean that “everybody comes back, that means your training ought to be in pretty good shape by that time.” When McNamara is silent over this contradiction being imposed on him, Johnson tries to soothe him by saying there is not anything really inconsistent in these new statements he wanted McNamara to make.31
LBJ Restores the Cold War Consensus
The reversal pattern illustrated in Vietnam was repeated elsewhere. As we saw in Chapter 2, in Congo, Kennedy had sided with the Dag Hammarskjold led United Nations in order to stop Moise Tshombe from breaking away the mineral-rich Katanga province from the newly independent Congo. In this, Kennedy had threatened to use economic warfare against England and Belgium, the former colonizer. He had also denied granting Tshombe a visa to argue his case before the American public.32 Meanwhile, Kennedy had invited Cyrille Adoula, the Congolese leader he favored, and a follower of Lumumba, to speak before the United Nations where he paid tribute to “our national hero Patrice Lumumba.”33 To show Kennedy’s support for him, Adoula was then invited to the White House.
Kennedy understood that Tshombe would essentially be a front man for England and Belgium to exploit Katanga for their benefit. And that Congo would be a poorer nation without Katanga. Therefore Kennedy now pushed hard to stop the splitting away of Katanga from Congo. In the face of this resistance, Tshombe asked for talks. These proved futile. Therefore, Kennedy backed a United Nations military force to prevent the secession of Tshombe’s Katanga. The hostilities began on December 24, 1962. By January 22, Katanga’s secession effort was over. A few months later, after Tshombe had fled to rightwing Rhodesia, the United Nations wanted to withdraw because of the large expense of the operation. Kennedy realized this was dangerous because the actual Congolese army was not stable or reliable. And also because, unlike Lumumba, Adoula was not a charismatic, dynamic leader. Kennedy decided the U.S. was not quitting. He even did something relatively rare. He flew to New York to address the United Nations himself. On September 20, 1963 he addressed the General Assembly on this subject. He urged the UN not to abandon a viable project when it got tough, since this would jeopardize the difficult gains already made. He said they should all “protect the new nation in its struggle for progress. Let us complete what we have started.”34 The General Assembly voted to keep the peacekeeping mission in place for another year.
But in October and November, things began to fall apart. Kennedy wanted Colonel Michael Greene, an African expert, to train the Congolese army in order to subdue a leftist rebellion. But General Joseph Mobutu, with the backing of the Pentagon, managed to resist this training which the United Nations backed. In 1964, the communist rebellion picked up steam and began taking whole provinces. The White House did something Kennedy never seriously contemplated: unilateral action by the USA. Johnson and McGeorge Bundy had the CIA fly sorties with Cuban pilots to halt the communist advance. Without Kennedy, the UN now withdrew. America now became an ally of Belgium and intervened with arms, airplanes, and advisers. Mobutu now invited Tshombe back into the government. Tshombe, perhaps at the request of the CIA, now said that the
rebellion was part of a Chinese plot to take over Congo. Kennedy had called in Edmund Gullion to supervise the attempt to make the Congo government into a moderate coalition, avoiding the extremes of left and right. But with the Tshombe/Mobutu alliance, that was now dashed.35 Rightwing South Africans and Rhodesians were now allowed to join the Congolese army in a war on the “Chinese-inspired left.” And with the United Nations gone, this was all done under the auspices of the United States. The rightward tilt now continued unabated. By 1965, Mobutu had gained complete power. And in 1966, he installed himself as military dictator.
To put it mildly, the end result was not what Kennedy, Hammarskjold, Lumumba, or Adoula had envisioned. Mobutu now allowed his country to be opened up to loads of outside investment. The riches of the Congo were mined by huge Western corporations. Their owners and officers grew wealthy while Mobutu’s subjects were mired in poverty. Mobutu also stifled political dissent. And he now became one of the richest men in Africa, perhaps the world. His holdings in Belgian real estate alone topped one hundred million dollars. One Swiss bank account held 143 million dollars.36 Mobutu then stayed in power for over thirty years.
In Indonesia, after President Kennedy helped negotiate the return of the last vestige of empire to nationalist leader Achmed Sukarno in 1962, he then issued NSAM 179. In this directive, he specifically wrote that he wanted a new and better relationship with Indonesia. And he urged all agencies to review their programs for aid to Sukarno to see “what further measures might be useful.”37 Kennedy had his aid bill based on NSAM 179 approved in November of 1963. Sukarno appreciated his new friendship with the American president so much that he invited him to visit his country in 1964. He even began building a new estate for him to stay in while he was there. But this new and warm American/ Indonesian relationship was not going to last long.
If we recall, Freeport Sulphur had been kicked out of Cuba after Castro’s revolution there. But in 1959, Freeport engineer Forbes Wilson made a potential billion dollar discovery. Buried in a library in the Netherlands was a geologic study of the Erstberg. This was a mountain in West Irian province that contained huge deposits of iron, copper, silver, and gold.38 With the permission and cooperation of the Dutch, Freeport had been doing a lot of exploratory work on opening a giant mine there. The Board of Directors had decided to approve a large construction bill to erect such a mine. But this all changed when Kennedy became president and worked on returning West Irian to Sukarno. As Forbes Wilson wrote, after this Sukarno made a series of moves which strongly discouraged all outside investment in Indonesia. He ordered all U.S. agencies, including the Agency for International Development, out of Indonesia. He then “cultivated close ties with Communist China and with Indonesia’s Communist Party, known as the PKI.”39
Two things happened in the space of two years that lifted Wilson’s fortunes, and Freeport’s. First, President Kennedy was assassinated. Shortly after, his aid bill landed on Johnson’s desk. The new president refused to sign it.40 The next year, Robert Kennedy visited Indonesia in place of his brother. When a journalist asked Sukarno what he thought of Bobby, he replied that he liked him very much. He reminded him of President Kennedy. Speaking of JFK he said, “I loved his brother. He understood me… . John F. Kennedy promised me he’d come here and be the first American President ever to pay a state visit to this country.” He then fell silent. “Now he’ll never come.” Sukarno now started to perspire. He mopped his brow and then asked, “Tell me, why did they kill Kennedy?”
In return for not signing the aid bill, in 1964 LBJ received support from both Augustus Long and Jock Whitney of Freeport Sulphur in his race against Barry Goldwater.41 In fact, Long established a group called the National Independent Committee for Johnson. This group of wealthy businessmen included Robert Lehman of Lehman Brothers and Thomas Cabot, Michael Paine’s cousin.42 Unlike Kennedy, Johnson now supported England in the creation of the new state of Malaysia on the Indonesian border. Sukarno then threatened to pull out of the UN if Malyasia was admitted. It was, and Sukarno made good on his threat. He then went to work on building an alliance of non-aligned Third World countries. Indonesia then quit the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Then, in early 1965, Augustus Long was rewarded for helping Johnson get elected. LBJ appointed him to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. This is a small group of wealthy private citizens who advises the president on intelligence matters. The members of this group can approve and suggest covert activities abroad. This appointment is notable for what was about to occur. For with Sukarno now unprotected by President Kennedy, the writing was on the wall. The Central Intelligence Agency now began to send into Indonesia it's so called “first team.”43
What happened next can be looked upon two ways. If one thinks that nationalism in a formerly colonized Third World country is good, and one wants to see these countries find their own way independently, what followed was a calamity of immense proportions. If one has the mindset of say a David Phillips or Allen Dulles, it was a multi-layered, interlocking masterpiece of a clandestine operation. A coup d’etat that was so well designed, so beautifully camouflaged, so brilliantly executed that—like the Kennedy assassination—writers are still putting pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together today. In fact, the Agency was so proud of it, that it recommended it as a model for future operations.44 And there is no doubt that it was a CIA operation because it was predicted almost a year in advance. In December of 1964, a Dutch intelligence officer attached to NATO said that Indonesia was about to fall into the hands of the West like a rotten apple. For “Western intelligence agencies … would organize a ‘premature communist coup’ [which would be] foredoomed to fail, providing a legitimate and welcome opportunity to the army to crush the communists and make Sukarno a prisoner of the army’s goodwill.”45 This is just what happened. On the morning of October 1, 1965, a group of young Army colonels banded together to attack and kill a group of generals who they feared were about to overthrow Sukarno. Somehow the young officers did not attack General Suharto. Even though one of them had visited him the night before.46 This was odd since Suharto had a reputation for collaborating with colonizing countries like the Netherlands and Japan. Suharto then led the Indonesian Army’s counter attack which crushed the colonels within forty-eight hours. Suharto now manufactured a military propaganda campaign to blame the killing of the generals on the Indonesian communists, the PKI. He then used that emotionally charged campaign to create what is probably the greatest anti-Communist pogrom in twentieth-century history. No one knows how many perished in the slaughter that followed. Estimates range from 200,000 to over 500,000. But because the PKI was central to Sukarno’s coalition, he had now suffered a mortal blow. Within one year, much of Sukarno’s power was given over to Suharto and the parliament. In 1967, Sukarno was stripped of his remaining powers and Suharto was made Acting President. Sukarno was then placed under house arrest. Like Mobutu, Suharto now began a thirty-year dictatorial reign. Like Mobutu, and unlike what Kennedy and Sukarno envisioned, Suharto now began to sell off Indonesia’s riches to the highest bidder. Including Freeport Sulphur, which opened what were perhaps the largest copper and gold mines in the world there.47 And in fact, revealing just how close Freeport was involved with the coup, in November of 1965, just one month after the counter attack by Suharto, with Sukarno still ostensibly in charge, Forbes Wilson got a call from the Freeport board about reopening their plans to take over the Erstberg. Wilson, the technical minded outsider, was surprised by the call.48 Freeport, along with several other companies, now harvested billions from the Suharto regime. Meanwhile the citizens of Indonesia remained quite poor. Many of them made about a dollar per day at the time Suharto was finally forced from office in 1998.
In Laos, the CIA had never been happy with the truce and then the coalition government arranged by President Kennedy and his envoy to the Geneva Conference Averill Harriman. In fact, Harriman told Arthur Schlesinger in May of 1962, before the coalition government agreement was signed,
that JFK’s Laos policy was being “systematically sabotaged” from within the government by the military and the CIA. He said, “They want to prove that a neutral solution is impossible, and that the only course is to turn Laos into an American bastion.”49
In large part this was done through Air America, the CIA’s covert Air Force operating in Southeast Asia out of countries like Thailand and Taiwan. According to Christopher Robbins’ study of Air America, the CIA and Pentagon obeyed the truce by moving cross border into Thailand. From there, forces were flown into Laos by Air America “whose entire helicopter operation was based in Udorn, [Thailand].”50 Then, in April of 1964, the coalition government was overthrown by the rightwing, with the CIA’s favorite Phoumi Nosavan in charge of a conservative government. The Pathet Lao, representatives of the leftists, were now left standing outside the door, hats in hand. They were pushed too hard and now the fighting was reignited at a more intense level. For all intents and purposes a civil war broke out. The Pathet Lao began to score some significant victories.
Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, & the Garrison Case Page 55
