JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  The report of October 2, 1963, became NSAM #263 after acceptance and approval of the President and his National Security Council. That NSAM #263 is dated October 11, 1963. It is the basis for a policy decision confirming that “presently prepared plans to withdraw 1,000 military personnel by the end of 1963” and to “train Vietnamese so that essential functions now performed by U.S. military can be carried out by the Vietnamese by the end of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that time.”

  The Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes carried the banner headline U.S. TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY ’65. (Note: Any researcher who looks for NSAM #263 in the Pentagon Papers will find that it was craftily entered as its cover sheet of only three sentences on one page, and about thirty or forty pages earlier the McNamara—Taylor Trip Report of October 2, 1963, is quite craftily entered without reference to the fact that it is the true body of NSAM #263.)

  This was the official and carefully drawn policy of the Kennedy administration, as written under the eye of the President. It was no casual or overnight scheme devised for limited purposes. This policy was developed in the face of the fact that at the same time the Buddhist uprising in the country was alarming. It was the positive and well-planned policy of the President. As such, it all but telegraphed the death of John F. Kennedy before his reelection.

  In boardrooms, gentleman’s clubs, and other secluded rendezvous locales, intimate groups of High Cabal principals quietly discussed this new policy and what it would do to their carefully planned, twenty-year objective: the “Saigon Solution.” With NSAM #263 and related policy actions, such as changes in military procurement methods, it was clear that President Kennedy stood between them and their own goals.

  It was also clear that this latest “all out by ’65” policy was going to assure JFK’s reelection. He had to go. With that foremost in their minds, a gradual, firm, and positive consensual decision was reached. The present government must be overthrown. They wanted no more of Kennedy; and they could not abide the thought of a Kennedy dynasty.

  With that, a highly professional movement was initiated: Part 1 was a professional hit job by skilled and faceless killers, and Part 2 was an intricate and most comprehensive cover story that gave us such indelible bits of lore as Oswald, Ruby, magic bullet, Warren Commission, and all the rest.

  By November 22, 1963, despite the Pentagon Papers’ contrived omission of that fact of history, Kennedy was dead. By November 26, 1963, President Johnson had signed NSAM #273 to begin the change of the Kennedy policy announced in NSAM #263 and in March 1964, LBJ signed NSAM #288 that marked the full escalation of the Vietnam War that involved 2,600,000 Americans directly, with 8,744,000 serving with the U.S. Armed Forces during that period.

  That was the “Saigon Solution.” That is the historical and factually biographical material of this book. As you read this insider’s account, it should be noted that it was the former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who wrote, in the New York Times, February 2, 1983:

  I do not believe we can avoid serious and unacceptable risk of nuclear war until we recognize, and base all our military plans, defense budgets, weapons deployments and arms negotiations on the recognition that nuclear weapons serve no military purpose whatsoever. They are totally useless—except only to deter one’s opponent from their use.

  Amen.

  If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security, as well as our liberty.

  John F. Kennedy

  October 29, 1960

  ONE

  The Role of the Intelligence Services in the Cold War: 1945—65, The Vietnam Era

  “THE DEEPEST COVER STORY of the CIA is that it is an intelligence organization.” So said the Bulletin of the Federation of American Scientists some years ago. It was a true statement then, and it is even more accurate today. At no time was this more evident than during the Vietnam War years.

  Have you ever wondered why the CIA was created, when such an organization had not existed before in this country, and have you ever tried to discover what specifically are the “duties” and “responsibilities” that are assigned to this agency by law? Or why it is that this “quiet intelligence arm of the President,” as President Harry S. Truman has called it, and its Soviet counterpart, the KGB, were the lead brigades on the worldwide frontier of what was the Cold War?

  In the real world—where more than six trillion dollars have been spent on military manpower, military equipment, and facilities since WWII ended in 1945—we discovered that the major battles of that Cold War were fought every day by Third World countries and terrorists. At the same time, the enormous military might of both world powers proved to be relatively ineffectual, because those multimegaton hydrogen bomb weapons are too monstrous, and too uncontrollably life threatening, to have any reasonable strategic value.

  The existence of these multimegaton hydrogen bombs has so drastically changed the Grand Strategy of world powers that, today and for the future, that strategy is being carried out by the invisible forces of the CIA, what remains of the KGB, and their lesser counterparts around the world.

  Men in positions of great power have been forced to realize that their aspirations and responsibilities have exceeded the horizons of their own experience, knowledge, and capability. Yet, because they are in charge of this high-technology society, they are compelled to do something. This overpowering necessity to do something—although our leaders do not know precisely what to do or how to do it—creates in the power elite an overbearing fear of the people. It is the fear not of you and me as individuals but of the smoldering threat of vast populations and of potential uprisings of the masses.

  This power elite is not easy to define; but the fact that it exists makes itself known from time to time. Concerning the power elite, R. Buckminster Fuller wrote of the “vastly ambitious individuals who [have] become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.” Fuller noted also, “Always their victories [are] in the name of some powerful sovereign-ruled country. The real power structures [are] always the invisible ones behind the visible sovereign powers.”

  The power elite is not a group from one nation or even of one alliance of nations. It operates throughout the world and no doubt has done so for many, many centuries.

  These leaders are influenced by the persuasion of a quartet of the greatest propaganda schemes ever put forth by man:

  The concept of “real property,” a function of “colonialism” that began with the circumnavigation of Earth by Magellan’s ships in 1520. A “doctrine of discovery and rights of conquest” was described by John Locke in his philosophy of natural law.

  The population theory of Malthus.

  Darwin’s theory of evolution, as enhanced by the concept of the survival of the fittest.

  Heisenberg’s theory of indeterminacy that is, that God throws the dice, and similar barriers to the real advancement of science and technology today.

  The first of these schemes derives from the fact that the generally accepted “flat earth” was, all of a sudden, proved to be a sphere by the voyage of Magellan’s ships around the world. It is not so much that certain educated men had not already theorized that Earth was round, but that with the return of the first ship Victoria the expedition’s wealthy financial backers had visual evidence that ships could circumnavigate the world and that because they could, Earth had to be a sphere. Being a sphere, it therefore had to be a finite object, with a finite—that is, limited—surface area. With this awakening the ideas of world trade and related colonial proprietary rights were born.

  It
may be postulated that this single bit of physical awareness brought about the greatest change in the mind of man since the dawn of creation. Before Magellan’s time, mankind had simply accepted as self-evident the fact that there was always more property “out there” over the horizon and that it was not essential that anyone think seriously about the ownership of land, particularly open land. This general idea ended with the return of the good ship Victoria.

  From that date on (circa A.D. 1520), the powerful rulers of the seafaring countries assumed the ownership of all real property in those discovered lands, and the natural resources on that property became one of the driving forces of mankind. One of the most important occupations of man during later years was that of surveyor. George Washington was a surveyor, outlining vast unknown tracts of land deeded by the King to his favorites, as though the King, and no one else—least of all those who inhabited these tracts—owned them. This paternalistic view of the right to the natives’ real property totally disregarded the fact that most of the new land discovered “out there” was, and had been, already populated by others for millennia. The power centers of that period were taking over the real property of the world—no matter who was on it or who had been living there—using little more than the surveyor’s chain, the missionary’s cross, and the explorers’ gun.

  By 1600, Queen Elizabeth had founded the East India Company, which was given charter rights to create proprietary colonies anywhere on Earth. During those long years when the British fleet maintained the global British Empire, the East India Company was the structural mechanism of the most powerful men on Earth.

  The East India Company founded Haileybury College in England to train its young employees in business, the military arts, and the special skills of religious missionaries. By 1800 it became necessary to initiate the task of making an Earth inventory, that is, to find out what was out there in the way of natural resources, population, land, and other tangible assets. The first man assigned the official responsibility for this enormously vital job was the head of the Department of Economics of Haileybury College.

  This man was Thomas Malthus, who, in 1805, postulated the idea that humanity is multiplying its numbers at a geometric rate while increasing its life-support capability at only an arithmetic rate. As a result, it has been universally concluded by the power elite that only a relatively few humans are destined to survive successfully in generations to come. The Malthusian theory thus provides a rationalization for the necessity of somehow getting rid of large numbers of people, any people, in any way—even genocide. With the Malthusian theory as the power elite’s philosophical guide, this becomes an acceptable objective, because, they believe, Earth will never be able to support the progeny of so many anyhow. From this point of view, genocide—then as now—is accepted as all but inevitable. Who cares and why be concerned?

  The third theory fortifies this approach further. Darwin persuades them to believe that because they survive, at no matter what cost to others and to Earth, they must therefore be—by definition—the fittest; and conversely, because they know they are the chosen, that is, the fittest, they are Earth’s assured survivors, fulfilling the prophecy of Armageddon.

  The fourth, Heisenberg’s nuclear age theory, provides an excuse for their errors and confusion. Certainly, if physical science is found to be indeterminate, economics can be, and so can everything else. Let God throw the dice, and we’ll take it from there. The one caution, the power elite later reasoned, was that new scientific discoveries and new technology must never be permitted to overwhelm the status quo as precipitously as the hydrogen bomb had done.

  Each of these concepts has been conveniently contrived to fit the occasion; each became the type of theory that is useful at certain times and in certain cases, but can never be proved and in most cases can easily be superseded by a more modern technology, a development of the science involved, or an awareness of the human rights that have been abrogated by the application of these rules of the powerful.

  From this point of view, warfare, and the preparation for war, is an absolute necessity for the welfare of the state and for control of population masses, as has been so ably documented in that remarkable novel by Leonard Lewin1Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace and attributed by Lewin to “the Special Study Group in 1966,” an organization whose existence was so highly classified that there is no record, to this day, of who the men in the group were or with what sectors of the government or private life they were connected.

  This report, as presented in the novel, avers that war is necessary to sustain society, the nation, and national sovereignty, a view that has existed for millennia. Through the ages, totally uncontrolled warfare—the only kind of “real” war—got bigger and “better” as time and technology churned on, finally culminating in World War II with the introduction of atomic bombs.

  Not long after that great war, the world leaders were faced suddenly with the reality of a great dilemma. At the root of this dilemma was the new fission-fusion-fission H-bomb. Is it some uncontrollable Manichean device, or is it truly a weapon of war?

  These leaders have realized now that use of the thermonuclear, fission-fusion-fission type of megaton-plus bomb will destroy mankind, nature, and Earth. Therefore, they have asked, must they abandon the historic madness of all-out uncontrolled warfare, or, in its stead, can they discover and create some alternative to war that will perpetuate nationalism and maintain national sovereignty?

  Since the dawn of that first realization, after the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, the H-bomb has emerged from the laboratories and has been used to atomize whole islands in the Pacific and whole chunks of the landmass of arctic peninsulas. It can be placed in the nose cone of a rocket-powered intercontinental ballistic missile and delivered, in minutes, to any place on Earth. Or, perhaps even more dangerously, it can be fitted into the trunk of an automobile and parked in an underground garage in any city in the world. A simple telephone beeper rigged to the bomb’s initiator will activate that nuclear explosive and pulverize any city of any size and any location.

  Such knowledge is sufficient. The dilemma is now fact. There can no longer be a classic or traditional war, at least not the all-out, go-for-broke-type warfare there has been down through the ages, a war that leads to a meaningful victory for one side and abject defeat for the other. Witness what has been called warfare in Korea, and Vietnam, and the later, more limited experiment with new weaponry called the Gulf War in Iraq.

  In his remarkable book Counsel to the President, Clark Clifford, former secretary of defense under President Lyndon Johnson, very frankly stated the problem that handicapped the military forces in Vietnam: “What was our objective in Vietnam?”

  Earlier, in a quandary about what President Johnson himself had meant in his speech of March 31, 1968, Secretary Clifford asked in the book: “What had he intended? Had he deliberately sacrificed his political career in order to seek an end to the war, or had he put forward a series of half measures designed to shore up domestic support, at a lower cost, without changing our objective in Vietnam? Did he know what his objective was?”

  These are absolutely alarming questions, coming as they do from a man who had been an adviser to presidents from Truman to Johnson during the most challenging years of the Cold War. He knew that we had been in a war in Vietnam since 1945; yet at the very time that he was the secretary of defense, in 1968, and when American forces in Vietnam had been increased to 550,000 men, he writes that neither he, the President, nor any member of the administration knew what the objective of this country or its military forces was in Vietnam. No army can win any war without a valid and tangible objective.

  Then, during a meeting in the White House on May 21, 1968, of the President; Secretary of State Dean Rusk; the military adviser to the President, Walt Rostow; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Earle Wheeler; and himself, Clark Clifford made this amazing statement: “With the limitat
ions now placed on our military—no invasion of the north, no mining of the harbors, no invasion of the sanctuaries—we have no real plans or chance to win the war.”

  There are, in the academic terms of a Clausewitz or other scholars of the evolution of warfare, nine principles of warfare; and paramount among these is that of the “objective.” What possible chance is there for victory when generals have not been given a clear description of the national objective for which they and their men must fight and die and in its place are given a list of incredible limitations?

  Because of this failure of leadership at the top, America sacrificed 58,000 men and spent no less than $220 billion. No wonder Clark Clifford and his associates were confounded by what they had inherited, from prior administrations, in the name of a “war” in faraway Indochina. This is one reason why it is so important to clarify that what was called a “war” during the first twenty years (1945—65) of this conflict was actually a massive series of paramilitary activities under the operational control of the CIA.

  This is what the hydrogen bomb and the clandestine services have done to the art of war. Under these circumstances, no commander today can be given an objective such that if he begins to achieve it, and therefore appears to be on the road to victory, he will force his enemy to resort to that weapon of last resort, the hydrogen bomb.

  Our six presidents of the Vietnam War era, 1945—75, were faced with this dilemma. None of them, or any member of their staffs, have expressed it better than Clark Clifford in his book, or Gen. Victor H. Krulak in First to Fight, his most important military book.

  Today the power elite can see no assured survival for themselves and their class if hydrogen bombs are utilized in warfare. Up until the end of WWII, this power elite on both sides of the fray, who exist above the war, have always been assured of survival. In any war in the future in which there is an exchange of H-bombs, there can be no assured Armageddon-type survival for the chosen, for mankind, for all of nature, or for Earth itself.