JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK

by L. Fletcher Prouty

  By mid-January 1954, the beleaguered French had 11,000 troops in fifteen battalions at Dien Bien Phu; the opposing Vietminh had 24,000 well-armed men in nineteen battalions. Nevertheless, the National Security Council believed this number of the Vietminh was insufficient to take Dien Bien Phu and defeat the French. However, they ordered a contingency plan to be drawn up by Allen Dulles, director of central intelligence, in the unlikely event of a French defeat.

  During this NSC meeting of January 14, 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles proposed that the United States prepare to carry on guerrilla operations against the Vietminh if the French were defeated, to make as much trouble for them as they had made for the French and for us. He believed the costs of such operations would be relatively low and that such a plan would provide an opportunity for the United States in Southeast Asia. The National Security Council agreed that the director of central intelligence should develop this plan for certain contingencies in Indochina.

  This is the way these activities are initiated and directed. The warfare in Vietnam grew out of the events of this meeting just as assuredly as the explosion of a stick of dynamite is caused by the ignition of the fuse. It was this same John Foster Dulles in Korea, serving as no more than a “bipartisan consultant” to the Department of State in June 1950, who had said, “No matter what you say about the president of Korea [Syngman Rhee] and the president of Nationalist China [Chiang Kai-shek], those two gentlemen are the equivalent of the founder of the church . . . they are Christian gentlemen.”

  Then, while still in Korea, on June 19, 1950, John Foster Dulles made a most unusual speech before the Korean Parliament: “The American people welcome you as an equal partner in the great company of those who make up the free world. . . . I say to you: You are not alone. You will never be alone so long as you continue to play worthily your part in the great design of human freedom.”

  The Koreans, taken completely by surprise, wondered what he meant by those words. Less than one week later, when the North Koreans invaded South Korea, they found out. On the very next Sunday, while Dulles was still in Japan, the Korean War broke out with an attack on the south by the North Koreans. For someone of his stature—a senior partner of the largest law firm in New York City, Sullivan & Cromwell, and a man who had found a worldwide platform in the World Council of Churches—these had been most unusual statements on many counts. They were surpassed only by his “prediction” of the outbreak of the Korean War at that time. As for his other statement about “Christian gentlemen,” few there are who have held the same opinion of President Rhee and Generalissimo Chiang, particularly the latter.

  That was 1950; by January 1954, this same trio of Cold War activists—John Foster Dulles, Walter B. Smith, and Allen W. Dulles—were busy moving the center of operations from Korea to Indochina after an incidental interlude with Quirino in the Philippines.

  On January 29, 1954, a meeting of the President’s Special Committee on Indochina convened in the office of the deputy secretary of defense, Roger M. Kyes. The ostensible purpose was to discuss what could be done to aid the French, who had made some urgent requests for military assistance. A major item on the agenda of this meeting was the reading of the “Erskine Report” on Indochina. Gen. Graves B. Erskine, USMC (Ret’d), was assistant to the secretary of defense, special operations, 1953—61, and under President Eisenhower was chairman of the Working Group of the President’s Special Committee on Indochina.3 This important report “was premised on U.S. action short of the contribution of U.S. combat forces.”

  At the end of the meeting Allen Dulles, then the director of central intelligence, suggested that an unconventional-warfare officer, Col. Edward G. Lansdale,4 be added to the group of American liaison officers that Gen. Henri Navarre, the French commander, had agreed to accept in Indochina. The committee thought this arrangement would prove to be acceptable and authorized Dulles to put his man in the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG), Saigon.

  The start of a new phase of the OSS/CIA activity in Indochina, this step marked the beginning of the CIA’s intervention into the affairs of the government of Indochina, which at that time was French. It was not long before the reins of government were wrested from the French by the Vietminh, after their victory at Dien Bien Phu under the leadership of our friend of OSS days, Ho Chi Minh.

  With this action, the CIA established the Saigon Military Mission (SMM) in Vietnam. It was not often in Saigon. It was not military. It was CIA. Its mission was to work with the anti-Vietminh Indochinese and not to work with the French. With this background and these stipulations, this new CIA unit was not going to win the war for the French. As we learned the hard way later, it was not going to win the war for South Vietnam, either, or for the United States. Was it supposed to?

  This is the way the CIA’s undercover armies work, as they have operated in countless countries since the end of WWII. They move unobtrusively with a small team, plenty of money, and a boundless supply of equipment as backup. They make contact with the indigenous group they intend to support, regardless of who runs the government. Then they increase the level of activity until a conflict ensues. Because the CIA is not equipped or sufficiently experienced to handle such an operation when combat intensifies to that level, the military generally is called upon for support. At that time the level of military support has risen to such an extent that this action can no longer be termed either covert or truly deniable. At that point, as in Vietnam, operational control is transferred to the military in the best way possible, and the hostilities continue until both sides weary of the cost in men, money, matériel, and noncombatant lives and property. There can be no clear victory in such warfare, as we have learned in Korea and Indochina. These “pseudowars” serve simply to keep the conflict going. As we have said above, that is the objective of these undercover tactics.

  This concept of the necessity of conflict takes much from the philosopher Hegel (1770—1831). He believed that each nation emerges as a self-contained moral personality. Thus, might certifies right, and war is a legitimate expression of the dominant power of the moment. It is more than that. It is a force for the good of the state since it discourages internal dissent and corruption and fosters the spiritual cement of patriotism.

  The Center for Defense Information has reported, “During the past forty years there have been 130 wars of varying intensity, including forty-one that are active today, in which no less than 16 million people have died” (report circa 1985).

  Of course, these were not true, all-out wars. They were the deadly skirmishes of the undercover armies of the Cold War. This enormous, smoldering cauldron is still boiling (as we have seen with “Desert Storm” in Iraq) and will not stop as long as warfare remains synonymous with nationhood. The elimination of war, in our structured society that is so much dependent upon superstition, implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state. As the Report From Iron Mountain so aptly finds, “The war system [is] indispensable to the stable internal political structure . . . war provides the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power. . . . The organization of a society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer. . . . The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers.” You will have noted during the 1992 election campaign the frequency of the suggestion that the President may resort to “another” war in order to strengthen his popularity before the election.

  Because there is no way to wage war with the H-bomb, there is no proper strategic role for today’s armed forces. Thus, WWIII must be directed covertly by the so-called intelligence services. It has been a war between the CIA and the KGB, as one might expect; but as we have seen in these examples from Spain and the Philippines, it is sometimes no more than a conflict of the “make war” scenario, with the CIA,5 or the KGB, creating and supporting both sides. The prevalence of worldwide terrorism shows this to be so.

  FOUR

/>   Vietnam: The Opening Wedge

  ON SEPTEMBER 2, 1945, the representative of the Emperor of Japan signed the surrender papers laid before him by Gen. Douglas MacArthur on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. With that ceremony, the great drama of history called World War II came to a close. At that time, the Allied forces of the United States, China, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union declared themselves victors, and the military forces of fascism under Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito were declared to be the vanquished.

  That is what historians have recorded, but what they failed to note is that this historic ceremony did not so much mark the end of war as it simply ended that chapter, that scenario, with that cast of characters.

  Behind the scenes, American and Soviet intelligence services had plotted the next chapter in the book of war. They had already begun to drape an “Iron Curtain” over the borders of Eastern Europe to widen the split in the wartime alliance between the Soviets and the Western powers. It had already been decided by these clandestine services that a new bipolar world would be created, divided on the issue of communism. In the councils of the power elite1 the issue was, as it has been for centuries, the absolute necessity of controlling society by the threat of war and the essential ceremonies of the perpetual preparation for war—what is now called “defense.”

  By September 2, 1945, this power elite had learned of its monstrous oversight, the greatest error of its lengthy hegemony over mankind. Unwittingly, they had encouraged their scientists and engineers to design and produce nuclear weapons. These weapons had been detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and with the dropping of these two nuclear bombs, a horrifying realization crashed down upon the members of the power elite. War, their most essential and valuable tool—that device which had made it possible for them to control society and to maintain the existence of nations and of national sovereignty—had been taken from them by their own scientists. They no longer had even the fifty-fifty option of the duelist. All that remained to them was a choice between no war—and suicide. A war waged with hydrogen bombs would most certainly annihilate the combatants and end life on Earth. Their role in the war-making game would have to change. Thus, we have had the Cold War and other types of contrived conflict.

  So, with the signing of that now-famous document on the deck of the battleship Missouri, a new form of war was launched in a world that believed what it read in the newspapers—that “the Last Great War” had ended.

  From September 2, 1945, forward and for as long as mankind could be manipulated through a media that fully controlled what people would be told, the great powers would go through all of the motions involved in the preparation for war and in making war. But wars would henceforth be victoryless conflicts in controlled and limited scenarios.

  Even the distinction between “us” and “them” and between “friend” and “foe” would have to be created arbitrarily. To lend this new warfare credibility, the power elite would create a bipolar world with two major superpowers, declared to be deadly enemies, armed to the teeth, and violently opposed to each other on every count. Each would be fortified as a defense against the other. This piling on of arms would increase annually, with no end in sight.

  By September 2, 1945, this new scenario had been outlined. All that remained was to mold the opinion of the world, changing it from the mind-set of World War II to a new alignment based upon a massive East-West confrontation.

  On that same date in the capital city of Hanoi, in Vietnam, a Declaration of Independence was signed by Ho Chi Minh as president of the new nation, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). As incredible as it seems today, the declaration began with the famous lines “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. . . . ”

  Before the ink was dry on the documents being signed on the battleship Missouri, the first major battlefields of this new Cold War, Korea and Vietnam, had been selected and were being stocked with arms. All that remained was to create the political climate for the bipolar world and to line up the combatants, who, at this time, remained unaware of their new roles. Whereas Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union had been allies against Germany, Italy, and Japan, all of this was going to change, even before World War II had ended.

  When Ho Chi Minh signed the Declaration of Independence for his new nation on September 2, 1945, he read the following lines from that document: “A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years—such a people must be free and independent.”

  After his long struggle on the side of the United States and the Chinese against the Japanese, and with concrete evidence of U.S. support in the form of a vast shipment of arms, Ho Chi Minh had good reason to believe that his days of fighting to end French domination of his country were coming to a close.

  The Japanese had surrendered and were leaving. The French had been defeated by the Japanese and would not return—or so he thought. Meanwhile, in the streets of Hanoi, agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), continued to work with the Vietminh, who had rapidly taken control of North Vietnam when the Japanese war effort had collapsed.

  Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho’s brilliant military commander, while serving as minister of the interior of the provisional government, delivered a speech describing the United States as a good friend of the Vietminh. That, too, was in September 1945.

  The manipulative strings of the power elite had not yet been pulled. The political roles had not yet been changed. It would take a few years of skillful propaganda to prepare the world for the new scenario. Time would pass before the power elite could create a new enemy—the Soviets and communism; and new friends—the former Fascists, Germany, Italy, and Japan, who were now to be known as friendly “anti-Communists.”

  On September 2, 1953, exactly eight years after World War II formally ended, President Dwight Eisenhower’s new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, delivered a major address before an American Legion convention in St. Louis. Although most of Dulles’s remarks focused upon the final stages of the Korean War, which had ground to a frustrating stalemate, he included a most significant statement with regard to communism and Indochina. Dulles said:

  The armistice in Korea does not end United States concern in the Western Pacific area. A Korean armistice would be a fraud if it merely released Communist forces for attack elsewhere.

  In Indochina, a desperate struggle is in its eighth year. . . . We are already contributing largely in matériel and money to the combined efforts of the French and of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

  In this remarkable statement, the “eight years” that Dulles cited on September 2, 1953, coincides precisely, to the day, with that date of September 2, 1945, when the surrender documents were signed in Tokyo Bay, when the ships sailed from Okinawa bound with an enormous supply of arms for Korea and Vietnam, and when the Declaration of Independence of the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam was signed by Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, with American officials by his side. That could hardly have been a coincidence. World events are planned.

  It was also almost eight years to the day when the first American casualty—Maj. A. Peter Dewey of the OSS—occurred in Vietnam. He was killed in a skirmish on the outskirts of Saigon on September 26, 1945.

  John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, recognized that September 2, 1945, was officially the date of the start of that “desperate struggle” in Indochina—later to become known as the Vietnam War. More importantly, during those eight years, the anti-Communist climate had been tuned to a hysterical pitch, both at home and abroad. South Korea had been invaded by “Communist” forces from the north, and through an intimate new medium known as television, moving pictures of an ongoing war were brought into the homes of millions of Americans for the first time. Families also watched while Sen. Joseph McC
arthy detailed the internal threat of communism in government and industry. The public viewed the scenario directly, and as the power elite wanted it to: The Soviet Communists were the “enemy” all over the world. Ho Chi Minh and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam were no longer our friends. They, too, were now part of the “Communist” enemy.

  Thus, although Secretary of State Dulles confirmed that the superpowers had been involved in a great invisible war and that it actually had begun on the same day that World War II ended, no one seemed to notice. Today it might be more accurate to say that the world war did not end, but that only the sides changed, and that the majority of the victims of that new type of warfare were the noncombatants of the Third World.

  That new invisible war, based on East-West alignments, was, more than ever before, dependent upon the justification provided by a propaganda line that stretched all the way back to the early nineteenth century, to the genocidal theories of Malthus and Darwin.

  As stated earlier, the Center for Defense Information had revealed in 1985 that “over the preceding years there had been 130 wars of varying intensity, including forty-one that were still active at that time in which no than 16 million people had died. This is a gross number that could match the casualty figures of almost any other period in history. For those who agree with Malthus, such enormous losses are to be expected; for those who agree with Darwin, those who survive are by definition the fittest.

  The chain of events in Indochina from 1945 to 1965 that had led to the intervention of regular U.S. military forces there reveals the methods employed by the invisible services to produce this scale of global warfare and destruction. During the years 1945—53, the eight years alluded to by Secretary of State Dulles, the web was being drawn, and new alliances were being craftily woven. Friends became enemies; former enemies became allies. Whole new governments were formed to provide the political linkages essential to the requirements of the new bipolar structure of the world.